Where should the type information be 239

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 01:33:05 -0700 in alt.folklore.computers, glen

AFAIR most IBM (and other high usage) machines with photoconductors had them on a continuous band, and advanced it every so often to even out the "wear", rather like an ink ribbon: seems obvious.

Talking about impressions on impact printers with ribbons!

Traditional overprinting had to be converted to send additional no-spacing line(s), either with underscores and the same TRC1, or else the character with a bold-italic font TRC. I never used a 3800, but I seemed to spend a lot of time getting other laser printers (and various other output devices) working transparently and providing full functionality with IBM software, which often required the software to believe it was dealing with a 3800 and a limit of four fonts per page. Character set support was annoying as it could be manufacturer, device, and font dependent.

1 TRC == Table Reference Character == font select, referring to a CAT == Character Arrangement Table == font, loaded into a WCGM == Writable Character Generation Module == scan line lookup table, of which there were four, reconfigurable for each page, although some IBM software supported only four per print job.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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