HP LaserJet Symbol Set Chart

I was also fooling around with Borland's Turbo Assembler product at the time. So, for my first non-trivial assembler project since college, I wrote a little DOS program called HPSYMSET to print a one-page chart of all the characters in any given HP symbol set. The upper-left corner of a sample page is shown at the right.

Download HPSYMSET.COM and execute it from an MS DOS window. (You'll probably have to right-click this link and choose "Save Link As..." or "Save Target As...".)

For those doing Web work, you'll want the chart produced by the command:

HPSYMSET 19U = Windows 3.1 Latin 1 (ANSI)

The original PC DOS character set can be produced by the command:

HPSYMSET 10U = PC-8 (IBM Extended ASCII)

FYI, here's a list of HP symbol sets:

  0D = ISO 60: Norwegian 1
  1E = ISO 4: United Kingdom
  9E = Windows 3.1 Latin 2
  1F = ISO 69: French
  1G = ISO 21: German
  0I = ISO 15: Italian
  6J = Microsoft Publishing
  7J = DeskTop
 10J = PS Text
 12J = MC Text
 13J = Ventura International
 14J = Ventura US
579L = Wingdings
  5M = PS Math
  8M = Math-8
 19M = Symbol
  0N = ISO 8859-1 (ECMA-94) Latin 1
  2N = ISO 8859-2: Latin 2
  5N = ISO 8859-9: Latin 5
  0S = ISO 11: Swedish
  2S = ISO 17: Spanish
  5T = Windows 3.1 Latin 5
  9T = Turkish
  0U = ISO 6: ASCII
  1U = Legal
  8U = Roman-8 (HP Factory Default)
  9U = Windows 3.0 Latin 1
 10U = PC-8 (IBM Extended ASCII)
 11U = PC-8 D/N
 12U = PC 850
 15U = Pi Font
 17U = PC-852
 19U = Windows 3.1 Latin 1 (ANSI)

If HPSYMSET is executed with no argument, it displays a help message:

HPSYMSET.COM:
   Prints a chart displaying a LaserJet symbol set
Argument:
   The first "word" of the argument specifies the desired HP symbol set code
   (Be sure that the code ends with an upper-case letter)
   Use "*" to display your printer's default symbol set
   Any additional text is added to the chart title
Examples:
   HPSYMSET * My Printer's Default
   HPSYMSET 8U is Roman-8 (HP Factory Default)
   HPSYMSET 10U = PC-8 (IBM Extended ASCII)
   HPSYMSET 8M
Requires:
   HP LaserJet III, IIID, IIISi, IIIP, or 4
   (Probably any HP LaserJet model III or better)
Author:
   Rex Swain · 8 South Street · Washington, CT 06793 · 860-868-0131

It still amazes me that the program file is only 1,948 bytes -- and about 600 of those bytes (30%) are the help message! That's smaller than this HTML file. No CD-ROM drive required. No need to ZIP it. Bare metal programming.

6/19/2005 -- Note that this DOS program prints to LPT1:, and modern versions of Windows do not know how to deal with that ancient technique. My friend Charles Brenner has a page explaining Printing from Windows XP, which may help you.