Re: STAR XB2415 PRINTER FILE

[SYSOP]

The basic problem with your printer file is that you are placing two fonts on
some lines in your PT tables. Each mode statement in a PT table must name one
and only one font. It may name one or more attributes. You have some lines that
list both the PRO font and the Times Roman font. You get in trouble because
XyWrite and the printer start to squabble over which font is really being used.
Furthermore, you have specified that the Times Roman font uses the Elite width
table. Times Roman is a proportionally spaced font. Elite is a monospaced, 12
cpi font. XyWrite thinks each character is 1/12 of an inch wide, and allows
that much room when deciding where lines will end. But when you actually print
the file, the printer knows how much room each character really needs (which
varies from char. to char. with a proportionally spaced font), and spaces
accordingly. (The underlying concept here is that XyWrite width tables DO NOT
dictate the width of the printed character. They simply inform XyWrite what the
width is going to be. The width is determined solely by the printer [normally]
and is not influenced simply by increasing or decreasing values in the width
table. The goal of the width table is to *match* what the printer is going to
do.)

So your task is to develop the proper width table for the Times Roman font.
There probably is some information about this in the documentation that came
with the font card (that's where this font is coming from, right, because this
printer doesn't normally have Times Roman?). You can use that as a starting
point. Take a look at the app note on testing width tables (#123 or #132, I
can't remember which).

Now, to my fellow nitpickers out there: way back at the beginning of this
message I said that each mode in a PT table had to name one and only one font.
YES, there are circumstances under which you can eliminate the font name, but
you have to really careful. If you do not name a font, you are denying XyWrite
some information that might influence its line-ending, page-breaking, and other
formatting decisions.

---chris