| I also have an EPSON printer, but have no problem getting italics to print.
1) Do you have the right printer driver installed? I have an FX-85 and
use the FX-80 driver.
2) Does your printer support italics? It probably does, unless its a
VERY early model. You can check this out by writing a small program
in Basic that will enable italic mode (providing you know Basic, or
some other programming language). Sometimes you can even enable
special characters via inserting special characters in a text file
via a text editor. Of course, you have to have the printer manual
handy so you know what control sequence enables special characters/
italics.
Incidentally, I recently bought an EPSON LQ-500, and it also seems to work
with the FX-80 First-Word driver for printing italics.
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| > I also have that version of 1st Word. I have a Panasonic 1081 printer,
> and I can't get any of the special settings either. Any ideas?
I have the same version of 1st Word and a Panasonic 1091
printer. I can get all of the fonts, but I had to work at it.
I had to tailor a printer driver to my printer. The 1st Word
printer drivers are just tables that list the sequence of
characters that the printer must receive to get it to print
any letter. For example, to get the printer to print the
letter "a" you just need to send an "a", but to print a u with
an umlaut you have to send the sequence "<ESC>R 2}<ESC>R0". I
found the sequences by studying the printer manual. There is a
minor catch in that the sequences have to be entered in ASCII
codes in hex, but the printer manual gives those too. The
sequence above is actually typed in as "1B, 52, 2, 7D, 1B, 52,
0". There are other entries in the table for the sequence to
turn on NLQ, bold, etc. The table is partially commented, to
tell you where to put each sequence. The part of the table
where you put the sequences that print characters from the
fonts isn't really commented; each line begins with a hex
number for the character that you can find in the Atari
manual. I put the u-umlaut sequence on the line beginning 81,
because that's Atari's code for u with umlaut. As I said, this
was work.
I started with the Epson printer driver because it required
the least editing. I edited it with 1st Word to make these
changes. I then ran a program, also found in the same folder,
to convert the table from text to binary and then copied the
resulting driver to the diskette's top level directory.
I would gladly post the driver here, but I haven't got any
compatible medium with my Vax. Does anyone have any ideas
about that?
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| re. base note:
Look in the directory "install".
It contains a large number of drivers for all sorts of printers.
It should contain the driver to your EPSON.
If you can't find it, then you'll have to first get a manual for
your printer, that gives you all the escape sequences. (I did that
for an LJ250 - took me a while to get them all straight)
Then you'll have to modify the template that is in the same directory
("install"), using a standard editor or 1st Word itself.
Wait a minute - did you say you're using 1st Word or 1st Word Plus
??
Maybe that's the catch !! But I'll continue how it works with 1st
WordPlus.
Find all the escape sequences it takes for your printer to switch
to the different modes and to display special characters, translate
them into the appropriate hex values and put them in, then you have
to run the program install in the same directory, which creates a
file with the suffix ".cfg". Copy this file into the directory from
which you run 1stwd and rename it "printer.cfg". This will autoload
the newly developed driver to your printer on startup.
Alternatively you leave the filename unchanged but click on the
"Printer" Entry that's on the main screen. The screen then will
show a file selection box and you can choose the appropriate file
to be loaded.
Takes a bit of time to test out your own driver, so you might save
that for a quiet weekend.
have fun
chris
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