On Thu, Aug 13, 2026 at 9:11 AM Alain Mouette via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Dot matrix impact printers used an interesting trick: it worked withs > half columns. Two dots of the same needle could not use intermediate > position, but a different needle/row could use all intermediate columns > but never repeat too close. This was based on mechanical limitations > > So my sugestion is to make the SW with half columns even if for now you > don't have the fonts for it >
I've been trying to figure out a good method to do that on screen. Ultimately, a virtual dot matrix printer should support "half dot" print head vertical movement too, so you can print at very high resolution. That makes the printer more interesting. One way to do it is to generate "firmware" by reading a scaled vector font. (I'd probably do it in a separate program: generate each character from a scaled vector font to the screen, then interpret the pixels to generate "firmware" for that character.) Using a method like that could make this program more flexible. I know that 9-pin printers like the Epson used one set of letter forms for "low resolution" printing, and another slightly different set of letter forms for "high resolution" printing (slow down the print head in the x direction) and another set of letter forms for "ultra high resolution" printing (also slow down the print head in the y direction). It shouldn't be too hard to generate a separate "firmware" for each, and use the appropriate firmware for whatever mode is required. That sounds like an interesting "version 2" feature. :-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
