CFOG's PIP, December 1987, Volume 6 No. 2, Whole No. 62, page 2

PRINT CONTROL CHARACTERS IN DBASE FIELDS

by Hanns Trostli, Brazil

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. I needed double wide characters in the printout of one field of my DBase II file and could not imagine how to do it. It is impossible to put control codes into a DBase field, nor the escape character. Then I remembered SmartPrint.

SmartPrint is a great program, sold by Software Research Technologies, who also sell SmartKey which is more widely known. For me the use of SmartPrint is a real boon as I'll explain below. The effect of this program is to change the character you type to something else on the way to the printer. This is the exact reverse of the "you get what you see" endeavor -- here you do not get what you see but something else. I think it is the only program that is available for this purpose. [Well, actually, I believe that XtraPrint and FlashPrint are similar in function. --bhc]

In this case I made the opening square bracket ([) signify ^[^N (ESC, CTRL-N) (hex 1B, 0E) which means to most dot-matrix printers "Shift Out" (SO) and makes them print the following characters in double wide style. (Some printers get by with ^N only.) A line feed ends the double-wide printing, which is what I wanted in my case. Thus into the field "Last" (for last name) I typed "[Smith" instead of "Smith". And, lo!... Smith came out in wide type.

You can establish all sort of print commands this way, underscore, emphasized, compressed, just anything. But do use signs or characters that you won't use otherwise, if not you are in trouble.

I use the closing square bracket (]) to mean ^H (CTRL-H), (hex 08), which is the signal for backspace, to write a cents sign into a SuperCalc field by typing: "/]c". This can be also used to print accents where you need them, something which I suppose must interest those who use foreign languages.

I use SmartKey since way back. I explained once in an article published in PIP how I print Portuguese characters using SmartKey for my Juki 6100 printer or downloading a set of characters designed by myself when using my Epson FX-80. These are perfect and easy solutions.

But there is another case in which the use of SmartKey is a must. Juki sells only three styles of typefaces on its daisywheels, but the Juki 6100 can use Triumph-Adler printwheels and the choice of typefaces of these is much greater. (It is regrettable that the choice of these for the Portuguese language is quite limited.) I needed compressed type for printing spreadsheets on the Juki and chose the Mini-Tile wheel with 15 cpi. I reccommend it, as it is very legible and one can print 120 characters in an 8" wide line. But -- some characters are not at the same place as on the Juki typewheels and the result is that when I have a vertical bar in my file, I get a "grave" accent in its place. Other signs have to be accessed by escape sequences (Escape K gives a c with cedilla, etc.) All this can be put right with SmartKey -- easily.