GTCO Super L III - Users Guide - Manual (Page 56)

Super L III 56
Binary Formats
Binary formats encode coordinate information compactly. Binary coordinate formats are
shorter than ASCII formats, transmit faster and take up less space if stored. On the other
hand, binary formats cannot be directly displayed on a terminal or printed-they must be
converted first into displayable characters.
Binary formats use the high order bit in each byte as a synchronization bit. The first byte in
each format has its high order bit set to 1. The remaining bytes have their high order bits
set to 0. The application program must examine the high order bit of each byte to
determine when a format begins.
Super L III can produce two kinds of binary formats: one is compatible with GTCO Super L
III and CalComp digitizers, and the other is compatible with Summagraphics digitizers.
They are quite different and are described separately in the following topics.
 GTCO/CalComp Binary Format
 Summagraphics Binary Format
 Low Resolution Binary Format
 Cursor Button Codes in Binary Format
GTCO/CalComp Binary Format
This six-byte format is compatible with the GTCO Super L III high resolution binary format.
It also emulates the CalComp binary format. Table 4 shows the structure of this format at
the bit level.