GB1336914A - Document encoding apparatus - Google Patents

Abstract

1336914 Selective signalling BURROUGHS CORP 3 Sept 1971 [17 Sept 1970] 41275/71 Heading G4H The invention relates to modifying the starting position of printing on a record. In Fig. 2, a unit record (e.g. blank cheque) 10 is fed through a printing station for printing of a series of multi-character fields by a hammer 48, interposer 46, print wheel 24 and ink ribbon 58, the print wheel 24 being stepped to the required position before each character. A plugboard specifies field beginning and end characters, and other characters to be printed come from a memory. Feed of the record is at high speed by rollers 60 until the document reaches (and is stopped by) rollers 64, 66 when photodetectors 71, 72 detect it and cause constant lower speed feed by rollers 64, 66. Printing commences in response to a photodetector 70 detecting the leading edge of the record, but photodetectors 71, 72, 74 also detect whether the record is long or short and if photodetector 74 sees the record when 71 and 72 do, an extra field is "printed" before the normal fields, under control of the plugboard, this field consisting entirely of blanks, so with the larger size record the actual printing starts further from the leading edge than with the smaller size. The precise position of the characters printed can be shifted in units of one eighth of the character width to compen sate for minor variations in record length by manually setting a rotary switch, clock pulses (8 per character) derived from the document drive incrementing a binary delay counter, the count of which is compared with the switch position (converted to binary), the clock pulses being gated to a zone counter (controlling printing) only after equality. The characters printed may be in a machine-readable font.