Epson FX-185 User Manual - Page 4

may use a version of BASIC other than Microsoft, you may need to modify some of the programs in this manual before they will run. Appendix F offers help, as do the next several paragraphs. Methods for sending BASIC print and listing commands to the screen and to the printer vary widely. We have used PRINT and LIST as the commands for the screen display, and LPRINT and LLIST as commands for the printer. You may have to change those to the form used by your system. If, for example, your system uses the PR#1 and PR#0 commands, you will need to change all instances of PRINT in our programs. Since we use PRINT to report progress to your screen and that command does not affect the printing, the easiest modification is to delete such PRINT statements. For example, 30 FOR D=1 TO 17: PRINT "ROW";D would become: 39 FOR D=1 TO 17 because the only purpose of the PRINT statement is to display on the screen information that is not absolutely essential to the program. Any BASIC system automatically provides a carriage return (and some BASICS add a line feed) after every program line that includes a PRINT or LPRINT command, whether that line prints text or not. To prevent the carriage return, we have you place a semicolon at the end of such program lines. You will see this technique throughout the manual. A few versions of BASIC use semicolons between any two control codes that fall on one program line, as in: LPRINT CHR$(27);CHR$(52) If you use such a version of BASIC, you will need to add semicolons as appropriate. After the ESCape code-CHR$(27)-the FX always expects another code. The second code tells the printer which mode to turn on or off, and you may enter it in either of two formats. One format is like the ESCape code-you use a number in parentheses after CHR$, such as CHR$(l). The other format is shorter since it uses only an alphanumeric symbol within quotation marks, such as "E" or "@". We usually use the latter format. iv