Multilingual ink jet printer
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsRorger W. Cornelius, James D. Hill, Paul A. Quinn, Jr.
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An interactive ink jet printer prints characters of a language from left to right or right to left in accordance with the direction in which the language is normally written. The signals for the direction in which a motor, which moves ink droplet supply device relative to a recording medium, the signals from a grating, which indicates the direction of motion of the ink droplet supply device and its position relative to a reference position, and the signals for the location of the ink droplet supply device at the reference position are changed whenever the direction of character printing is to be reversed.
Claims27
An ink jet printer including:
- a recording medium;
- supply means to supply ink droplets to said recording medium to cause printing of droplets thereon as characters;
- first reference means and second reference means spaced from each other along a first axis;
- one of said recording medium and said supply means having movement relative to the other along the first axis in either direction;
- one of said recording medium and said supply means having relative movement with respect to the other along a second axis at an angle to the first axis;
- determining means to determine the position of the movable one of said recording medium and said supply means with respect to one of said first reference means and said second reference means at any time and to determine the direction of motion of the movable one of said recording medium and said supply means along the first axis with respect to one of said first reference means and said second reference means;
- a plurality of font information holding memories;
- at least one of said font information holding memories containing font information requiring printing of characters by movement of the movable one of said recording medium and said supply means in one direction along the first axis;
- at least one of said font information holding memories containing font information requiring printing of characters by movement of the movable one of said recording medium and said supply means in the reverse direction to the one direction along the first axis;
- selection means to select one of said font information holding memories for character printing;
- and means responsive to said selection means to cause said determining means to determine the position and direction of motion of the movable one of said recording medium and said supply means with respect to one of said first reference means and said second reference means when said selection means selects one of said font information holding memories requiring printing of characters in the one direction along the first axis and with respect to the other of said first reference means and said second reference means when said selection means selects one of said font information holding memories requiring printing of characters in the reverse direction along the first axis.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.