Ricoh InfoPrint Pro C900AFP InfoPrint Manager - Page 186

Machine carriage control characters: Machine carriage controls were originally the actual hardware control commands for InfoPrint printers and are often used on non-InfoPrint systems. Machine controls are literal values, not symbols. They are not represented as characters in any encoding, and therefore, machine controls cannot be translated. Typical machine controls are: Machine Action X'09' Print the line and single space X'11' Print the line and double space X'19' Print the line and triple space X'01' Print the line (do not space) X'0B' Space one line immediately (do not print) X'89' Print the line, then skip to channel 1 (top of form, by convention) X'8B' Skip to channel 1 immediately (do not print) Machine controls print before doing any required spacing. There are many more machine control commands than ANSI. Carriage controls might be present in a file, but every record in the file must contain a carriage control if the controls are to be used. If the file contains carriage controls, but the line2afp command keyword and value cc=no is specified, the carriage controls are treated as printing characters. If no carriage controls are specified, the file prints as though it were single spaced. Variable-length and fixed-length files The line-data transform program needs to know two things about a file in order to transform it: v The length of each print record v The kind of carriage control used Some files contain information in each record that describes the record length; these are called variable-length files. Other files require an external definition of length; these are called fixed-length files. For variable- and fixed-length files using length prefixes, MO:DCA-P structured fields are treated as a special case. All such structured fields are self-identifying and contain their own length. They need not contain a length prefix to be correctly interpreted but are processed correctly if there is a length prefix that matches the structured field length. Variable-length files: Variable-length files can use a length prefix, which means they contain a prefix that identifies the length of the record in the file. Each record contains a two-byte field that gives the length of the record. If the record contains a length, that length must be a prefix for each record and it must be a 16-bit binary number that includes the length of the 2-byte length prefix. Use the fileformat=record keyword and value to identify files with length prefixes. Variable-length files may use a separator or delimiter to indicate the end of a record, instead of using a length prefix. All of the bytes up to, but not including, the delimiter are considered part of the record. For AIX, the default delimiter is X'0A'. If the file uses EBCDIC encoding, the default newline character is X'25'. Use the fileformat=stream keyword and value to designate files that use newlines to indicate record boundaries. 172 InfoPrint Manager for AIX: Procedures