Typewriting machines – Including selection of type-face by...
Patent
1995-11-20
1998-06-30
Hilten, John S.
Typewriting machines
Including selection of type-face by...
400 76, 400586, 4006152, B41J 300
Patent
active
057723400
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a tape printing apparatus for printing print data, such as a desired character string, on a tape, and more particularly, to a printing apparatus having a function for printing character strings over a plurality of lines on a tape.
BACKGROUND ART
There has been recently developed a tape printing apparatus for printing a desired character string (characters, signs and the like) on a tapelike printing medium (referred to as "tape" hereinafter). This tape printing apparatus is used widely for business or home use because of its ability to easily and neatly print a heading or a title on the surface of a tape and ease of use in making a backbone of a file and a title label of a videotape.
In particular, the latest printing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 5-177905 allows a plurality of lines to be printed on a tape simply and easily with introduction of the concept of "paragraphs". Herein, a paragraph means a set of one or more lines to be simultaneously printed on a tape. FIG. 7(A) shows an example of a tape made by using the concept of paragraphs, which is composed of a first paragraph 70 consisting of one line and a second paragraph 71 consisting of three lines. FIG. 7(B) shows an example of an editing state of this tape. Numerals 72 and 73 denote marks each indicating a head of a paragraph, numerals 74, 75 and 76 denote marks each indicating a head of each line in a paragraph, and numeral 77 denotes character strings input in each line. The paragraphs thus edited are sequentially printed in a feeding direction of the tape, by which a plurality of paragraphs having different numbers of lines can be printed.
Since such a tape printing apparatus is used to make a backbone of a file and a title label of a videotape, it is sometimes required to obtain a vertical print as shown in FIG. 8, and therefore, is generally provided with a vertical print function.
In the case of a backbone of a file, it is required in some use that some characters be arranged laterally in vertical printing. FIG. 9(A) shows a print example in such a case. Characters "NO1" in the first paragraph are arranged laterally even in vertical printing.
However, as the comparison between FIG. 7(A) and FIG. 8 reveals, the tape printing apparatus according to the prior art sequentially prints lines (first, second, . . . ) from the top of the label in vertical printing while turning each character at a right angle without changing print positions of character strings. Therefore, in order to print "NO1" shown in FIG. 9(A), characters "1", "O" and "N" must be respectively input in the first, second and third lines in reverse order to the arrangement thereof in the editing stage as shown in FIG. 9(B). The user needs to input the characters while inverting the positional relation of the line in idea. Such an input method loads the user heavily, and changing edited results is difficult.
The use of the tape printing apparatus is not limited to printing of Japanese characters, and the tape printing apparatus can be provided for languages of all the countries of the world by changing an input means and stored data. In some languages, vertically written sentences are read from left. FIG. 10 shows an example of such a language. In order to vertically print character strings printed laterally as shown in FIG. 10(A), the character strings need to be printed in the positional relation shown in FIG. 10(B), which causes a similar problem.
Furthermore, it is conceived that input character strings over a plurality of lines may be inverted vertically or interchanged in lateral printing. For example, there is a case where the name of town, the address and the name are respectively input in the first, second and third lines of an address label, and then, the name is required to be printed in the first line in view of a print result. For that purpose, an expensive word processor is provided with an editing function for easily interchanging sentences. However, in a tape printing apparatus required to b
REFERENCES:
patent: 5374132 (1994-12-01), Kimura
patent: 5399030 (1995-03-01), Niwa et al.
patent: 5480246 (1996-01-01), Morimoto
patent: 5494360 (1996-02-01), Watanabe et al.
patent: 5549399 (1996-08-01), Sakuragi et al.
Patent Abstracts of Japan, vol. 17 No. 595 (M-1503), 29 Oct. 1993 re: JP-A-05 177905 20 Jul. 1993.
Patent Abstracts of Japan, vol. 9 No. 124 (M-383) 29 May 1985 re: JP-A-60 009759 18 Jan. 1985.
Nunokawa Masahiko
Watanabe Kenji
Hilten John S.
King Jim Co. Ltd.
Seiko Epson Corporation
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