This is my first thread, please inform me if I have put it in the right place. Also, feel free to skip to the bullet points if you don’t want to read my story. Also also, the concepts in this post require MathPrint enabled calculators, so if you don’t have one, you are wasting your time here.
At one point in my ongoing, fascinating journey in TI-BASIC programming I realized that I could pretty my programs up with better characters. I started by making use of some characters in the statistics menu, particularly the x and y coordinate subvalues (x1, y1, and so forth). However, while these are useful, there are some characters that just seem hopeless to obtain. And in fact, many ASCII characters that are supported by TI calculators are not actually used anywhere in the OS, which means that they cannot be obtained without a computer. Yeah, you could write a fancy flash app or a painstakingly complicated assembly program, but at that point it doesn’t seem worth it anymore, and it almost feels like cheating on TI BASIC (which is just fine to do, but it usually takes more effort and is reasonably unfashionable). Anyway, here is a tricky method I came up with for “decanting” a particular character, as I call it, directly on the calculator, as well as a way to solve your character problems without the need of a third-party flash app or an outside assembly program.
The basic idea behind “decanting” is the lack of support for mathprint in string variables. The trick to decanting something is simple. You go to the home screen to enter something in. First, place a quote mark. Now, open up something like the fraction MathPrint option. You should see 2 dotted box outline characters, which means you should type something in. Not today, however! Leave them blank, and now place a quotation mark after it. Now, press enter. See how the MathPrint was converted to string format, but the empty box characters are still there? Paste your input into a new input on the home screen, but this time store it to a string variable. Now, enter a blank program, recall the string variable, and you can edit each character. Delete the bolded division sign that you will find, as well as one of the empty box characters, and you have now successfully isolated the empty box character with which you can do whatever you like! Store it to a string, output it as text, display it, whatever.
A neat way to get all of the supported characters on the calculator is through the computer. Open up the TI link software, and select the “write new program” option. Now type in whatever characters you want (provided they are supported) make the program store them to a string variable, and now send it to your calc. This works for all supported characters, but I have found that the empty box gives you an “invalid token” error, the same you would get with an unsupported character so, as far as I know, my decanting method is the only way to get it without the use of a flash app or assembly program. Hope you enjoyed!