Printer CM6337. Additions

A short article about working with the CM6337 ​​printer for the newspaper “Abzats”, published in Room 22. Written based on personal experience of using this printer on a “Profi” computer in its various operating systems.

IN Issue 21 of the newspaper “Abzats” was published article “Printer CM6337”. I was a little puzzled by its appearance. I have owned this printer for many years and have printed more than one kilometer of paper. Although the printer was used. It came with an album of diagrams. Later I managed to get another album and a roll feed mechanism (which I did not have at that time). If anyone needs diagrams, please write to me, I think we can come to an agreement. The album takes up 45 A3 sheets.

Additional information regarding the printer.

Some characteristics:

• Maximum print speed is not less than 180 characters per second. Average technical print speed is not less than 60 lines per minute with 136 characters per line.

• The maximum print speed with increased print quality is not less than 40 characters per second. The average technical speed with increased print quality is not less than 10 lines per minute with 136 characters per line.

• The number of characters per line is 156 with a print pitch of 2.54 mm.

• The set of printable characters is at least 162 (lowercase and uppercase letters of the Russian and Latin alphabets, numbers and signs).

• The dot matrix format for basic printing is 9×11 dots, for high quality – 18×23 dots.

• Print options:

1. the pitch of printing characters in a line is (2.54+-0.25) mm and is variable depending on the print density selected by the user.

2. The step between lines is (4.23+-0.25) mm and is variable at the user’s choice.

3. the height of the character is not less than 2.3 mm (for uppercase characters with a 9×11 decomposition matrix).

The printer firmware is compatible with the EPSON printer. Two commands are missing:

1. Printing in italic font (italics).

2. Printing with double vertical font.

In general, there are several firmware versions for this printer, in one of which I managed to find printing with double font vertically.

In addition to Dmitry's article.

Switches S6.7 and S6.8 are indeed not used.

Now some personal experience.

I would like to point out a very important detail that Dmitry mentioned in passing. The printer has a built-in memory of 4 KB, three of which can be used for a downloadable character generator. This distinguishes the CM6337 ​​printer from a number of other printers, and opens up some pretty tempting possibilities.

In particular, under the iS-DOS OS there is a program that allows you to load an arbitrary font into the printer's memory. Subsequently, the text information is output using this font. This allows you to print texts in a beautiful font without using graphic modes. Which significantly increases the printing speed.

After loading the font into the printer memory, it will remain there until the printer is turned off. This gives the possibility to: load the font in the iS-DOS operating system, reboot the computer and print with the loaded font from any program of another operating system, in particular TR-DOS, CP/M. Under the iS-DOS OS there are several ready-made fonts, as well as a terribly inconvenient font editor.

It is worth mentioning separately that on the CM6337 ​​you can get a density of 240 dpi if you use the four-fold print density mode. And these are already very good results when outputting images. But there are two points:

1. The speed leaves much to be desired.

2. The image turns out dark

If you use printer control command combinations correctly, the results exceed all expectations. I was able to print complex formulas (three- or more-story formulas, over- and under-arrow signatures, etc.) from a regular text editor. There was an idea to write a special program for composing and editing formulas. The output was planned to be a piece of text, practically unreadable, but it could be inserted into any text editor. In theory, it is possible to alternate graphic information with text, which allows you to insert graphics in any text editor without changing anything in the printing procedure.

On an A4 sheet with its landscape orientation, we obtained a line of 3000 pixels.

I will give a hint to schoolchildren and students. Although the characteristics indicate that the height of the letters is not less than 2.3 mm, in reality you can get letters a little more than a millimeter high. Which is very useful when printing various cheat sheets. To do this, you need to print the entire text in a superscript or subscript, and, of course, select the appropriate line spacing.