In good ol' fashioned serial applications, I used to always find a way to set bits/per symbol (usually 7 or 8), number of stop bits, etc. In the hardware or software serial implementations for the Arduino boards, I have not run across these options. I read somewhere that the data must be sent as 7-bit ascii, because an 8-th bit is not an option. I would like to send the bytes of floating point numbers as floating point, not ascii. Is it possible?
Check this page: Serial.begin() - Arduino Reference there are options to set the config to whatever you like. Note they the default is 8N1, so you likely don't need to mess with it.