Modes For Pitches; Pica And Elite Modes - Epson FX Series User Manual

If you look through Appendix A, you'll notice that none of the FX's
characters use dots in consecutive main and intermediate columns in
the same row. There is a reason for this: the printer's speed. The FX
recalls a character's dot-matrix pattern from ROM and prints it in
1/160th of a second. At that speed, the print head is simply moving
too fast to pull the pins back and forth in time to print an overlapping
dot. This fact is critical when you design characters, as you will see in
Chapter 15.

Modes for Pitches

Several of the FX printer's modes produce characters in different
widths, or pitches. You may recognize two of these pitches as standard
character widths used on typewriters; a third produces a narrower
character. Each of these three is covered in one of the subsections
below, followed by a discussion of how the FX assigns priorities to its
print modes. We discuss other pitch modes later.

Pica and Elite Modes

At start-up the FX prints 10 characters per inch (cpi). This is the
same pitch as that of a typewriter's Pica character set. The FX can also
print characters in an Elite pitch (12 cpi). When you print in Pica on
the FX-80, you can get up to 80 characters on a line; changing to Elite
Mode gives you 96. When you print in Pica on the FX-100, you get up
to 136 characters per line; Elite Mode gives you 163.
Changing the print pitch between Pica and Elite does not change the
number of columns in each character, nor does it change the pattern
used to create each character. It simply moves the columns closer
together or farther apart to change the width of
see how this works, compare the Pica and Elite letters shown in
Figure 3-5. Since the columns used to print Elite characters are packed
more closely than those for Pica, more of them fit on one line of print.
Notice Elite pitch compresses spaces as well as characters.
that
Elite Mode (which produces Elite pitch) is set with an ESCape "M".
Try it in this program:
NEW
10 LPRINT CHR$(27)"M"
20 LPRINT
PICA BELOW"
52
COMPARE ELITE PITCH WITH THE
character. To
each