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I
DOWNLOADABLE CHARACTERS AND
CUSTOM COMMANDS
DOWNLOADABLE CHARACTERS AND CUSTOM COMMANDS
Beyond all the capabilities discussed so far in this manual,
Gemini offers two more extremely flexible functions. If the Gemini
doesn't have the characters you nepd already built in, you can
custom design your own. (In computer jargon, this is called
downloadable characters). Up to 96 downloadable characters can
be memorized by the RAM of the printer. You can also use the
Gemini's ability to group commands together into a single com-
mand to simplify your programming ("macro command", more
jargon). This chapter explains the use of these options and gives
you some practical examples from which to build.
As we learned in Chapter 3, some professions make use of
special characters. For example, there are special symbols that
are used by chemists, pharmaCists, architects, electrical
engineers, linguists, astronomers, medical researchers, and so on.
Let's start our downloadable character education by choos-
ing a new character to create. Because the editors will be the first
people to look at this text, we'll choose one that they'll feel com-
fortable with, the paragraph symbol,
1l.
This little backward Pis
used in both manuscript editing and in word processing. Unfor-
tunately, it's not one of the standard characters on most printers.
Appendix K lists all of the standard characters on your printer.
To design a new character, we have to layout which dots
within a character cell (character position) should be printed. The
easiest way to lay this out is to take a piece of blank paper or graph
paper and mark off a block of 7 squares high by 9 squares wide,
like we've done in Figure 8-1. Along the left-hand side, write the
numbers 1,2,4,8,16,32, and 64 vertically. Place a dot in each square
that you want a dot to appear in the character. One rule before you
start placing dots, across any horizontal row, there must be a
space between each dot. This isn't as bad as it seems because
the actual character will be printed narrower than the graph paper
shows.
115
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