TransAct Technologies ITHERM 280 - Manual (Page 264)

ITherm® 280 Unicode and Fonts iTherm ® 280 Programmer’s Guide
Page 262 Rev C 28-07764
and character pitch commands are supported as legacy commands. The appearance of the
print using those commands has been optimized using the TransAct WGL4 font. If you elect to
use your own font, or the GB18030 font, you may wish to use the scalable font control
commands to select the character size and spacing rather than the legacy commands.
TransAct Technologies provides a basic WGL4 font with the printer. This may be supplemented
or replaced with a GB18030 Chinese font upon request. The printer will accept TrueType and
compressed stroke fonts as defined by Monotype. If required, the customer may supplement
the TransAct supplied fonts with their own custom fonts.
WARNING: If you elect to load fonts into the printer you must have proper
rights to that font. Do not download a font to the printer if you do not have
the right to use the font as a downloaded printer font.
Unicode
As computer systems started to address more and more international environments, the classic
ASCII standard with code pages became unworkable. Several competing systems were
developed. however it was clear that a standard needed to be developed. In 1991 Version 1.0
of the Unicode standard was developed, to standardize how and where characters are to be
addressed in an expanded addressing scheme. In 2000 Version 3.0 of the Unicode standard
was published and generally accepted. The ITherm 280 follows this standard for character
placement and encoding
17 .
Note: If a custom font is used that is not in Unicode order, the order of the font will be
used as if it were in Unicode order. Any subsequent character mappings will assume to
be in Unicode order and may not produce the desired effects.
Unicode Encoding
The ITherm 280 Printer supports Unicode character addressing using Unicode Transform
Format or UTF as defined in the Version 3.0 Unicode Specification. There are several forms of
UTF encoding.
UTF-16 is the most straightforward way to access characters above 255. UTF-16 essentially
sends two 8-bit bytes that form a 16-bit address to access the desired character. Basic UTF-16
does not define the byte order. If you wish to use UTF-16 and allow the printer to determine the
byte order, you must send the byte order mark (0xFEFF) before you send any characters. To
prevent loss of byte order synchronization, you should periodically send the byte order mark to
resynchronize the printer with your application. If UTF-16 is selected, all data sent to the printer
must be 16 bits. All commands and command parameters are also 16 bit, however only values
between 0 and 255 are valid. Note that 24 bit encoding is not supported.
UTF-16BE uses the big-endian method of sending the two bytes. This method sends the high
byte first and then the low byte. It is not required to send the byte order mark (0xFEFF) for the
correct byte order to be initialized. However, to prevent loss of byte order synchronization, you
should periodically send the byte order mark to resynchronize the printer with your application. If
17 The Version 3.0 Unicode standard defines a 24 bit addressing method that is not supported by the Epic
430 TM . The Epic 430 TM is limited to a 16-bit address value. Values greater than 65535 will be truncated
to 16 bits.