The TM-950 has some features that do not occur in normal printers, and Windows does not provide any standard way to access these features. To make these featrues accessable from Visual Basic, the driver has assigned special meaning to some of the characters between 128 and 160 (80H to 9FH). When the application tries to print one of these characters, the driver will replace the character with the appropriate command. These characters have to be sent using one of the printer fonts not a TrueType font.
This is a table of the characters that have special meaning to the TM-950 driver and the actions that they cause.
Character
Hex Decimal Function
81 129 30 ms pulse to drawer 1
82 130 50 ms pulse to drawer 1
83 131 80 ms pulse to drawer 1
84 132 100 ms pulse to drawer 1
85 133 130 ms pulse to drawer 1
89 137 30 ms pulse to drawer 2
8A 138 50 ms pulse to drawer 2
8B 139 80 ms pulse to drawer 2
8C 140 100 ms pulse to drawer 2
8D 141 130 ms pulse to drawer 2
91 145 Select Journal
92 146 Select Receipt
93 147 Select Journal + Receipt
9f 159 Print stamp
Example 1:
PRINT #1, chr$(130);
causes a 50 ms pulse to be sent to open cash drawer 1
Example 2:
PRINT #1, chr$(147);
causes any subsequent data printed to appear on both the receipt and the journal
Caution about switching between journal, receipt, and both:
When printing TrueType fonts or graphics, send the command to select the paper at least one pixel higher on the paper than the top of the font or graphics. To switch back send the command at or below the bottom pixel of the font or graphics. If you send the command somewhere inbetween some of the data may be missing or on the wrong paper.