JPH0533668B2 - - Google Patents

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION A. Field of Industrial Application The present invention relates to an irregular character printing method for printing a mixture of ordinary characters and irregular characters, particularly bar codes, using a dot printer.

B. Prior Art A conventional line dot type printer registers only font patterns with a fixed number of vertical and horizontal dots, such as full-width characters and half-width characters, in a font memory, and after reading out the font, prints a line between each font pattern. Editing was done by adding a string of dots between characters or narrowing the spaces between characters, and outputting this to a printer as a dot pattern.

Therefore, this printer device can only print regular characters, and can print barcodes and other characters with different widths than regular characters.
Since it is not possible to print irregular characters such as OCR characters, there is a drawback that labels containing regular characters and irregular characters such as barcodes cannot be created.

C. Problems to be Solved by the Invention The present invention is capable of creating labels that include irregular characters such as barcodes and OCR characters as well as sentences that use regular characters such as kanji and kana in one printing. The purpose of this invention is to provide a printer device.

D. Means for Solving the Problems The dot printer printing method of the present invention stores irregular characters having an aspect ratio different from that of the standard font pattern in a font memory in which regular characters are registered as a standard font pattern, in the same memory area as the standard font pattern. At that time, the irregular character data registered in the font memory is stored in an area for one character in the font memory along with data for restoring the irregular character data to the original irregular character. The pattern data in the font memory is then returned to the original irregular characters and printed. Specifically, an alternating black and white pattern along a straight line orthogonal to one barcode bar is printed in an area corresponding to one character in the font memory. In addition, write the number of dots for the full width of the barcode in the same area, and when forming the print pattern, when the barcode specification data is read from the print data, the font The folded and registered black-and-white alternating pattern is read out from the storage area of the specified barcode in the memory, developed in a straight line at a predetermined position on the output buffer, and the same black-and-white alternating pattern is printed on the output buffer for the length of the bar. In this case, the input data is arranged in the length direction of the bar.

E. Effect Barcodes are longer in width than regular characters, and their width is not an integral multiple of that of regular characters, and their height is also not an integral multiple of that of regular characters. Furthermore, even if an attempt was made to compress the width of a barcode to the width of one normal character and store it in the font memory, 24 dots in the width direction would not be enough to compress the barcode as it is. Therefore, storing a barcode in font memory usually requires the number of characters. The present invention focuses on the fact that a barcode can be reproduced with any length in the vertical direction if there is information about an alternating pattern of black and white along a straight line orthogonal to the vertical line, and the present invention Since the alternating black and white pattern when traversed is recorded in a horizontal row of dots in the area of one character in the font memory, barcodes can be recorded with a maximum width of 24 x 23 dots. Even barcodes can be stored in an area for one character. Here, 23 in 24 x 23 is because one row of dots in the horizontal direction in one character area of the font memory is used to record data indicating the number of dots in the full width of the barcode. When a barcode is stored in an area for one character in the font memory as described above, generally the entire area for one character is not used, and a blank space remains at the bottom. However, because the barcode width data is stored,
It is possible to read only the necessary portion without having to read out this blank space as a barcode. When printing with a printer, the printer sequentially extracts the necessary character patterns from the font memory according to the document data sent and develops them as dot patterns on the output buffer. When data appears, read the barcode width from the specified barcode area of the font memory, scan that area horizontally, and write dot data for the specified number of dots in a horizontal line in the specified area of the output buffer. Then, the developed dot pattern is repeated for a predetermined length in the vertical direction to form a barcode print pattern. Therefore, there is no need to read data for several characters for one barcode.

Embodiment FIG. 1 shows an example in which the present invention is applied to a label printing device.
CPU 2, ROM 3 for storing programs, font memory 4 for storing patterns of kanji, kana, alphanumeric characters, etc., output buffer 6 for storing print patterns obtained by editing read font patterns, output It is composed of a thermal transfer type line-dot printer head 7 driven by a signal from a buffer 6, a document buffer 10 that takes in input document information, and is connected to a host computer 9 via an I/0 port 8. ing.

FIG. 2 shows a part of the font memory, where both normal characters and irregular characters such as bar codes are registered, with each character occupying an area of 24 x 24 bits.

This embodiment deals with the case where the width of one character of a barcode is irregularly wider than the width of one character of normal characters (24 dots) (large barcode affixed to transported cargo, etc.). In this barcode, each character is an area corresponding to one character in the font memory, and as shown in Figure 3, the first line indicates the number of dots of the character width, and the example shown in the figure shows that one character is 37 dots wide. ing. A barcode dot pattern is written over two lines below the second line. If you read out 37 bits of this dot pattern from the second row to the third row and arrange them in one line, you will get the barcode shown in Figure 4a, and if you repeat this dot pattern in the column direction, you will get the barcode shown in Figure 4b. . In actual reading from the font memory, 8 bits per byte are read, so in the above example, 5 bytes are read and the last 3 bits are discarded. All characters and symbols are given a 4-digit numerical code, and the character information is now being sent from the host computer 9 to the 5th code.
When a signal string of 16 bits per character is sent as shown in the figure, the CPU 1 first imports this signal string into the document buffer 10, then sequentially reads out the data in this document buffer and selects the font corresponding to the character code. The pattern data is taken out from the font memory 4, the font pattern of one line of character strings is edited based on the format data, and the edited font pattern is stored in the output buffer 6. FIG. 6 shows a part of the inside of this output buffer.

FIG. 7 is a flowchart of the operation of editing the font pattern from the document data taken into the document buffer 10 and configuring the print pattern for one line of the document in the output buffer. Each character has a predetermined code number, and the content of the document buffer is a string of these code numbers, but barcodes and OCR
Irregular characters such as letters are identified by this code number. First, it is determined whether the code read from the document buffer is a normal character (b), and if it is a normal character, the next flag judgment is NO (described later), and in step (c), the character pattern of the specified code is read from the font memory 4, The data is stored in a specified location in the output buffer 6. In the case of a character at the beginning of a line, the storage location on the output buffer is specified by the margin data in the format. When the pattern for one character is stored in the output buffer, specify (d) the starting position of the next character on the output buffer (by format data), advance the reading of the document buffer by one character (e), and the operation is Return to reading the document buffer.

In the case of a barcode, if step (a) is NO, the operation goes to step (f), then sets the flag mentioned above, reads the data in the first line of the designated area of the font memory (g), and then reads this data. The data is read from the second row to the third row by the number of bits specified by and is temporarily stored in the barcode register (H).
The reason why the dot pattern of the read barcode is not immediately stored in the output buffer 6 is because in this embodiment it is assumed that one line of the document includes a normal character part and a barcode part, so the line with the barcode is Then, if we limit it to cases that do not include other types of characters,
The barcode dot pattern read from the font memory can be immediately stored in the output buffer. Now, in step (H), the starting position of the next character is specified on the barcode register, and in step (E), the document buffer is advanced by one character, and the operation returns to reading the document buffer. After repeating this operation for the barcode string and reading the last character of the barcode (h), the next character will normally be at the end of the line, so the operations will be (a) and (b). At this point, the flag mentioned above is set, so step (b) is
Since the result is YES, the flag is erased and the operation goes to (li).
In (li), repeat the dot pattern of the barcode in the barcode buffer for the length of the barcode and transfer it to the output buffer, then specify the start position of the next character in the output buffer and read out the document buffer. return. At this time, since the reading of the document buffer has not been advanced by one character, the same character is read out again and the operation becomes a normal character operation, progressing as (a), (b), ... (e), and completing the operation for one line. Since the length of a barcode usually spans multiple lines in a document, the above operation is performed for the first line that contains the barcode, but for the second and subsequent lines, the barcode is placed at a line break or a line break in the document buffer. The space for the barcode is entered, and on the output buffer, the barcode is skipped and the start position of the next character is specified in step (d).

If the data read from the document buffer is an OCR character whose width is narrower than that of a normal character, steps (a) and (f) will be NO, and the process will proceed to step (v), where the data in the first line will be read from the specified area of the font memory. The data in the first line indicates the number of dots in the width of the OCR character, so from now on, read the registered OCR character pattern in the same way as normal characters and store it in the specified location of the output buffer ( The starting position of the next character on the output buffer is specified (wa) using the data obtained in steps (w) and (l), and the operation returns to reading the document buffer through step (e).

In the above example, as a modification of the irregular character pattern,
In the case of barcodes, the dot pattern that crosses the barcode is wrapped and stored in an area for one normal character in font memory, and the remaining space is left as is. In the example above, margins are added to the OCR character pattern and the pattern is registered as the same size as normal characters, but the format of the modification is not limited to this type. Furthermore, although the data for restoration is a numerical value indicating the character width in the above example, there may be various other methods for this as well. A feature of the present invention is that two types of data are registered in the same space as the normal character registration area on the font memory, in addition to pattern data for irregular characters, data that provides instructions for restoring the irregular characters. This is where the characters are registered in the same space as normal characters.

Effects According to the present invention, as described above, one printer can print ordinary characters and barcodes, and when storing barcodes in font memory, one barcode can print ordinary characters and barcodes on font memory. Since it can be stored in the area for one character, the font memory capacity can be significantly saved.Also, since the barcode is treated as one regular character, document data including barcodes can be converted into a dot pattern for printing. In the case of expansion, compared to the case where one barcode is stored in an area corresponding to the number in the font memory, the time required for expansion is shortened and printing efficiency is improved.

[Brief explanation of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing one embodiment of the present invention;
FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a part of the font memory, FIG. 3 is a diagram of the barcode registration pattern in the font memory, and FIG. 4a is a diagram of the barcode dot pattern restored from the above pattern. b is a barcode obtained by expanding the above dot pattern;
The figure shows an example of the contents of the document buffer, FIG. 6 shows part of the contents of the output buffer, and FIG. 7 is a flowchart of the operation of an embodiment of the present invention.

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1 A barcode is created by recording an alternating black and white pattern along a straight line that intersects with the vertical line of the barcode in an area for one normal character in the font memory as a dot pattern in horizontal dot rows over the required number of rows. In addition to registering it in the font memory, data indicating the number of dots in the width of the barcode is written in the area corresponding to one character, and when printing a document containing a barcode, the document sent to the printer Based on the data, the required character data is read from the font memory and developed as a dot pattern on the output buffer. When data that specifies a barcode appears in the document data, it is read from the storage area of the specified barcode in the font memory. The width of the barcode is read, and the data read from the same area in the horizontal direction by the number of dots corresponding to the width is developed in a horizontal row in a predetermined area on the output buffer, and the developed dot pattern is spread out in a predetermined vertical direction. A method for printing irregular characters in a dot printer, characterized in that a barcode pattern is constructed by repeatedly expanding the characters according to the length thereof.