Ithaca ITHERM 280, Programmer'S Manual

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Character sets and Code Pages
The iTherm
®
280 Printer supports 65 different international character sets. In IBM and
EPOS printers, there are two ways of selecting a character set. One way substitutes
international characters in the upper 128 characters of a standard character set. The
substitution technique supports a few different countries. However, as more and more
countries were added, too many characters were being replaced, and it became a
problem for the application to match the characters displayed and printed.
To solve this problem, a second method of selecting a character set was developed -
code pages. The printer and display use the same code page, and the application
displays and prints the same characters. IBM and EPOS defined new commands to
select code pages, and left the old commands in effect.
The iTherm
®
280 Printer supports international character sets as well as code pages. To
allow the most flexibility for the application programmer, both methods are extended in
the iTherm
®
280 Printer. In IBM mode, there are 19 character sets and 60 code pages.
In EPOS mode, there are 57 character sets and five code pages.
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The iTherm
®
280 Printer allows the IBM code page selection command to choose
character sets as well as normal IBM code pages. The EPOS character set select
command has been extended to allow additional character sets over and above the 11
defined by EPOS. The EPOS code page select command has not been extended
because there is no EPOS definition beyond the first six ID’s.
All characters in code pages as well as character sets are addressed as zero through
255. (Characters below 32 must be addressed with the [ESC] ^ <n> command.) Code
pages may be changed at any time and are active for all features including rotated print.
To allow other code pages to be created by an application, a redefine character set
command is provided.
As discussed above, there are two commands for language selection in IBM mode. The
first is [ESC] !, which selects one of 19 international character sets. The [ESC] !
command does not allow all of the possible character sets to be selected, it is provided
for compatibility with older programs only. The second is [ESC] [ T, which selects any of
the 58 code pages. In EPOS mode, the [ESC] R command has been expanded to
select any of the 59 international character sets or code pages.
[ESC] !
Select international character set
ASCII [ESC] ! <n>
Hexadecimal 1BH 21H <n>
Decimal <27> <33> <n>
IPCL &%CS <n>
EPOS [ESC] R <n>
Description The [ESC] ! <n> command selects international character set <n>. In
standard mode, the value of <n> is as follows.
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Epson provides limited code page support through ID to code page translation. Only six
translations are defined.