ESC/P Set Absolute Horizontal Print Position

Question

I am having trouble with setting the horizontal print position in an Epson LX-300 II dot matrix printer. The command to set the horizontal print position does not work somet

Answer 1

The problem I found is that UTF-8 is multi-byte encoding and ESC-P needs the commands to be in a single byte, from 0-256

ISO-8859-1 is single byte encoding up to 256.

Java byte is a decimal from a signed 2's compliment so numbers over 127 are negative.

public byte getN1(int total) {

    // a java byte can only be -127 > 127
    // so the negative numbers represent the numbers greater than 127

    int n1 = total % 256;
    if (n1 > 127) {
        n1 = n1 - 256;
    }
    return (byte) n1;
}

public byte getN2(int total) {

    // N2 is a factor of 256. so it is multiplied by 265 and added to N1.
    // generally it is either 1 or 0 but can be more for things like vertical
    // position.

    int n2 = total / 256;
    return (byte) n2;
}



public String setAbsoluteHorizontalPosition(int dots) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {

    byte[] x = { ESC, '$', this.getN1(dots), this.getN2(dots) };
    return new String(x, "ISO-8859-1");
}