ASCII emulation

ASCII emulation tells the process to treat the input data as a stream of ASCII characters. The data stream is read one character at a time, a line is constructed, and that line is added to the data page buffer.
In this emulation, you can define how to handle carriage returns that are not followed by line feeds and how to handle tabs. You can also define whether you want any Hewlett Packard Printer Control Language (HP PCL) escape sequences to be removed.

Note: ASCII emulation is only used when merging ASCII data with a PlanetPress Design document.
When choosing an ASCII sample data file to be merged with a Connect template, select Text emulation (see Text-based emulation).

Using an ASCII file on a printer

If an ASCII file gets sent to a printer (which is possible in a PlanetPress Suite solution), you need to know if your printer supports binary mode as this is the recommended mode for ASCII emulation. On printers that support binary mode, you can switch the printer to binary mode using the printer keypad or by sending the appropriate PostScript code to the printer.
In binary mode, the printer reads the end of line characters (carriage return [CR], line feed [LF], and carriage return followed by a line feed [CRLF]) as they appear in the data stream and does not perform any substitution. A printer that does not support binary mode or is not running in binary mode replaces any CR, LF, or CRLF that appears at the end of a line of data with a LF.
A form feed signals the end of a data page in ASCII emulation. If no form feed occurs in the data stream, the emulation adds data to the data page buffer until the buffer is full.

ASCII emulation options

  • Tab on carriage return: Select this option to fix formatting problems caused by isolated CR characters found within the data. When this option is selected, isolated CR characters are spaces, as defined in the Number of spaces in the tab box below. Note that this option is available only when the Read in binary mode option is selected.
    • Number of spaces in the tab: Enter the number of spaces you want the application to use when an isolated carriage return character is found within the data. This number typically corresponds to the maximum column number. If your data is formatted so as to occupy a maximum of 120 characters on each line, enter a value of 120 in this box, so when an isolated CR character is found, the data following the CR character will appear starting from column 121. Note that this option is available only when the Tab on carriage return option is selected
  • Number of spaces per tab: Enter the number of spaces you want to use when actual TAB characters are found within the data.
  • Remove HP PCL escapes: Select if you want all Hewlett Packard Printer Control Language escape sequences to be removed from the data.