JPS61104860A - Reduction printer - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To generate characters and etc. of optionally reduced sizes from character informations of standard sizes by attenuating dot character informations read out from a character generator at selective intervals and by transmitting the informations that are as much compacted as before the attenuation to an image buffer. CONSTITUTION:If a reduction command is transmitted to a code buffer 1 together with the informations of codified characters and etc. from a host computer and etc., a CPU2 reads the reduction commands, and the dot informations of a font of a standard size that are read from the character generator 3 are transmitted to the thinning circuit 6. The circuit 6 thins the dot informations according to the degree of the reduction datum contained in the reduction command, and he characters and etc. are reduced. The operation which eliminates the dot series in the diagonal lines, and rearranges the remaining dot informations closely to the point in the upper left corner is called a thinning. The dot informations of the thinned, reduced characters and etc. are transmitted to the image buffer 4 and further transmitted to a printer 5 and printed as reduced characters and etc.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION (a) Field of Industrial Application The present invention relates to a reduction printing device capable of printing characters, etc. of arbitrary reduced size.

(b) Prior Art Recently, electronic printers have been used, and among them, dot-type printers in which letters, numbers, symbols, etc. (hereinafter referred to as "characters, etc.") are made up of a large number of dots are widely used.

By the way, printers use characters of different sizes due to necessity or to improve legibility, and to form various reduced characters from the conventional standard font (7 ont), a thinning method is used to separate each character. A method is used to reduce the size by thinning out some of the constituent dots, but the thinning rate is often fixed for circuit configuration reasons, and is fixed if not fixed, so the reduced character The size is limited. Therefore, it may not be sufficient to improve the appearance of prints or to print various contents.

(c) Object and structure of the invention The present invention has been made in view of the above points, and aims to provide a reduction printing device capable of printing characters, etc. of arbitrary reduction size, and achieves this object. In order to do this, dot character information read from a character generator that stores character information in the form of a dot matrix is thinned out at selectable dot intervals to become dot character information.

By printing with a printer using the dot information of the reduced characters, etc., the reduced characters can be obtained.

In the present invention, if the thinning process is realized by hardware as in the above embodiment, character information can be processed in a short time and is suitable for high-speed printing, but it is of course also possible to process by software using a microcomputer.

(e) As described in detail of the invention, in the present invention, dot character information read from a character generator that stores character information in the form of a dot matrix is thinned out at selectable dot intervals, and the dot character information is thinned out at selectable dot intervals. Since the subtracted amount is compressed and transferred to the image buffer, any reduced character information can be obtained from the basic size character information, and characters of any size can be generated.

Therefore, the appearance of the print can be improved, richness can be added to the content of the print, and the quality of the print can be improved.

[Brief explanation of the drawing]

Figure 1 is a basic circuit diagram of the main parts of the reduced printing device according to the present invention, Figure 2 (a) is dot matrix information such as characters stored in the character generator, and (b) is how it is stored in the memory. , (c) is an example of the bit pattern of dot matrix information, and FIG. 3 is a diagram explaining the principle of thinning used in the present invention, (a) is dot matrix information before thinning, and (b) is FIG. 4 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a thinning circuit used in a reduction printing apparatus according to the present invention. 1... Code buffer, 2... CPU, 3... Character generator, 4... Image buffer, 5...
... Printer, 6... Thinning circuit, 62... Pulse generation circuit, 65.66-... Counter, 64... Branch circuit, 65... Gate circuit, 67... Register.

Claims (1)

[Claims] A character generator that stores character information in the form of a dot matrix, a thinning circuit that thins out the dot character information read from the character generator at selectable dot intervals, and the dot character information read from the character generator. 1. A reduction printing device comprising: transfer means for compressing the image by the amount of thinned-out dot information and transferring it to an image buffer.