Programmer's Guide User guide

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11 Thermal Printer Programmer’s Guide

Printing Unicode Characters in PCL

To print Unicode characters, the symbol set 18N (UCS-2) should be used to set handling

to Unicode mapping together with UTF-8 text parsing method. Refer to the following

syntax:

<ESC>&t83P<ESC>(18N<ESC>(sn

Tdata …

The 83P in <ESC>&t command signifies the UTF-8 text parsing method. The 18N in

<ESC>( command sets the Unicode mode. The n

T is used to select a font in the

<ESC>(s command where n

is the typeface id of the font. Immediately following are the

characters to print in UTF-8 format. Refer to the example below:

<ESC>&t83P<ESC>(18N<ESC>(s1p16v0s0b9999T<D8><B6><CE><B1><E0><B

8><82><EA><B0><95><E8><90><81>

This prints the characters “ض α?강萁“ (an Arabic, Greek, Thai, Korean and Chinese

symbol) assuming the font supports all of these characters. The font selection command

parameters are “1p” for proportional spacing, “16v” for point size of 16, “0s” for no italic,

“0b” for no bold and “9999T” for typeface ID.

Datamax-O'Neil Barcode Command Structure

Command Structure Syntax

As stated earlier, printer commands are performed in the order that they are combined,

from left to right. There are several barcode parameters that are only relevant to a subset

of the total number of barcodes provided.

All Datamax-O'Neil barcodes and their support parameters will begin with the following

sequence:

<ESC>$b... 0x1b 0x24 0x62

There are several escape commands associated with barcodes. Any escape command

that modifies a property of a barcode will only affect the currently selected barcode. For a

label design with multiple barcode types, modification of one or more barcode properties

does not affect the properties of any other barcode type.

The following commands illustrate how one might handle modifying the default

parameters for multiple barcode types on a single label. Note that the examples below

have line numbers. For ease of reading each line is separated by a carriage return and

line feed. When sending this data to the printer, all the lines in the examples should NOT

have a carriage return and line feed except where you see the symbol “CRLF”. The

“CRLF” symbol indicates a carriage return/line feed combination should be inserted into

the data stream. The “<ESC>” symbol indicates the escape character (hex value 0x1B)

should be inserted into the data stream.