ESC/P programming!

Question

Why i need to use it is because for some printers using TPrinter prints some weird hieroglyph at the beginning of the printable area.

My problem is that if i send some commands, nothing happens.

ESC E (#27 #69) - Sending this escape sequence didn't work as i expected. It removed first letter and rest of the string made bold. eg. Hello -> ello. After i changed it to ESC E ESC (#27 #69 #27), it worked fine. This example i managed to figure out, but...

trying to select character table "ESC t n" (#27 #116 n), to make "õäöü" work. This command just doesn't work. Nothing happens! And this command is supported by esc/p, esc/p 2 and 9-pin esc/p, so it should work just fine.

Manual can be found here.

If anyone has ever needed to use esc/p commands then maybe one can shed some light how to work with them!

Thanks in advance!

EDIT:

In my previous post i asked more or less the same question though answers were about how did i send commands to the printer. (I'll change my question there according to what was the answers!)

I accepted Ken's answer, because he claimed that the way i transferred the commands wasn't the best and i got it to work with Escape command. The problem was that after trying to use my program with another printer, it didn't work as expected, because it uses TPrinter.Begindoc and EndDoc.

So actually i must use the other solution that Rob Kennedy helped me with!

EDIT 2:

As it turned out, i used wrong manual, where commands are little different (though still supporting esc/p as it proclaims). Thank you all for your help!

PS! I still have a question: I need a character table where

245 = õ
228 = ä
246 = ö
252 = ü

which is iso 8859. But in manual there is no such character table or any similar to it. Should i do some string manipulation and replace eg 228 to 132 or does anyone know any better approuch?

I keep it unanswered for a while, and then accept stukelly's answer.