Epson LQ-1500 User Manual - Page 52
CHAP 4-CONTROL CODES, Computer-to-Printer-Communications
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Chapter 4 Control Codes This chapter introduces you to the control codes you can use to send instructions from your computer to your printer. If you already know how to program your printer, you'll want to know how control codes work with the LQ-1500. You'll also be interested in Appendixes A and E which provide the control codes. Please note that this chapter contains technical information and you don't have to read it in order to operate your printer or to perform ordinary word processing operations. If you don't know how to program a printer, you can use your applications software to find out how to control the LQ-1500. Computer-to-Printer-Communications Alphabetical characters (letters) are foreign to computers; computers only know numbers. However, computers still manage to do a good job of manipulating the letters that we use for word processing. The secret lies in the fact that a computer doesn't manipulate letters at all-it just manipulates numbers that represent letters and turns these numbers into the letters that we see on the screen and the printout. The computer communicates with the printer by means of numerical codes. There are 256 different codes that the computer can send to the printer, represented by the numbers from 0 to 255. Since there are many different kinds of computers and many different kinds of printers, a standard set of codes was developed that almost all computers use to comunicate with printers. This set of codes is called the American Standard Code For Information Interchange, or ASCII for short. There are ASCII codes for all the letters in the alphabet (both upperand lowercase), the numbers from 0 to 9, most punctuation marks, 45