An Improvement in the Art of Chain Printing 4005

wrote, in part:

No, I must admit.

That may be, but while the tolerances will be tighter, that will be mainly because a higher print quality is desired.

To give a concrete example: there are two staggered rows of hammers, each hammer is occupying a space that is 1-5" wide. The proportional spacing is so chosen that the possible times when a hammer can strike the paper lead to a unit system based on a 1-40" unit.

For monospaced printing, each hammer acts as if it were *two* hammers, striking either when a normal character is in its right half or its left half.

For proportional printing, each hammer takes on the role of *four* hammers.

That is an increase in complexity, but it is not insupportable.

*Also*, if the chain is moving at the right speed, and the electronics sends the same shape of pulse to the hammer at the time when the hammer is to fire... you would still have only the same thing to adjust as you did before, the speed of response of each individual hammer, so that the characters are all aligned.

But thinking about this seriously, I *do* now see a potential source of problems. In the monospaced character case, when you have the same character repeated - MMMMM - the same hammer has to fire twice in quick succession. That might throw off the timing of the second impact. After all, in normal chain printer designs, a hammer always only has to fire once per line.

John Savard Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download