Trying a third version of the post that has gotten blocked twice now.

The original version had fully spelled-out variable names specifying whether
the lines are single or double, horizontal or vertical, or which corner.  If
this version gets thru, that might mean someone's filter got excited by those
terms :)  I'm making other changes too, but those are less fun...

----------------------------------------------------------

If anyone doesn't like the HP line-drawing character-set, there is a different
approach that has been working for us on laser printers for years.  Select the
PC-8 character set with escape (10U.  Not sure if it is really better, but at
least you can just set it once at the start and not have to switch back when
you want ordinary characters.  (Also, it might be more portable to non-HP
hardware  ?? )

Never tried this on terminals or PCs until today, but a quick test indicates
that
:echo ![chr(201) + rpt(chr(205),10) + chr(187)]
and
:echo ![chr(218) + rpt(chr(196),10) + chr(191)]
work if I select 'PC English (437)' as the host character set in Reflection
setup - terminal - emulation menu (version 10.0).  Not sure if any other
char-sets work, or what to do on dumb terminals or other terminal emulators.

Also, the following works to print to a laser that is not normally set on PC-8
:FILE P;DEV=EJP
:echo ![CHR(27) + '(10U' + chr(201) + rpt(chr(205),10) + chr(187)] >*P

The old Cobol routine is, first set up the following items under 'special
names' (subtract 1 from all the numbers to get what you would use with the chr
function in an mpe routine)
     SYMBOLIC CHARACTERS
**   NOTE:   symbolic characters are 1 thru 256, so each value
**           is 1 higher than the 0-to-255 code used elsewhere
**           esc =  octal 33 = decimal 27 = sym-char 28, etc.
         ESCAPE                  IS  28
**   PC-8 character-set single-thickness line-drawing
         S-T-L         IS  219
         S-T-R        IS  192
         S-B-L      IS  193
         S-B-R     IS  218
         S-V        IS  180
         S-H       IS  197
**   PC-8 thin double-lines
         D-T-L         IS  202
         D-T-R        IS  188
         D-B-L      IS  201
         D-B-R     IS  189
         D-V         IS  187
         D-H       IS  206
(which  should give you a list of codes to use)
and then define lines in working storage like
     05  F               PIC  X(01)  VALUE  D-T-L.
     05  F               PIC  X(26)  VALUE  ALL D-H.
     05  F               PIC  X(01)  VALUE  D-T-R.
and
     05  F               PIC  X(01)  VALUE  D-V.
     05  F               PIC  X(26)  VALUE  "  whatever & so-on".
     05  F               PIC  X(01)  VALUE  D-V.

Dave Powell,  MMfab.

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