I agree with Bill L. in that I'm surprised you can't get the LA120 codes,
at least for common functions like CPI and LPI, to work. I don't have a
reference for the LA34 specifically at hand, but my Terminals & Printers
Handbook says it uses the same ANSI standard escape sequences as the LA12,
LA100, and LA120, wherever possible.
I'm a little concerned/confused, too, about your reference to octal. You
do NOT send "octal" to the printer; you send ASCII characters. Each ASCII
character is a 7- or 8-bit binary entity, which can be *represented* in
either octal, or hex, or binary, or just about any other radix you can
think of. The sequence to put the printer in 12cpi is ESC [ 2 w where "ESC"
is the ASCII "escape" character (whose value is octal 33 or decimal 27 or
hex 21), and the remaining characters are plain-old-printable-ASCII-text.
-Bill