🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-03-17, Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 09:41:24 -0500, Dave Garland wrote:
>
>> That really depended on hardware. A formed-character printer (ball or
>> daisywheel) couldn't change font without the ball/wheel being manually
>> changed by the operator. You could, of course, program a halt to
>> permit for that, but it was a PITA and really balked workflow. Some
>> type balls had a superscript 2 and 3 , but anything else had to be
>> done by manually rolling the platen, Dot matrix printers weren't used
>> for WP in business, because the print quality was too poor (the
>> standard was pretty much, it ought to look like it was done on a
>> Selectric with a film ribbon).
>
> I seem to recall some newer fully formed character printers could do bold
> by movie the paper just a little but and print the same character
> "almost" over itself again. Didn't some matrix printers employed this
> method too to print bold if their character set wasn't made up for this?

The standard in one mainframe shop in which I worked was to overprint
heading and total lines on our line printer.  This was less effective
when the ribbon was fresh, but since we were trying to wring every bit
of ink out of a ribbon it usually looked pretty good.  Whether it was
good enough to slow our printer down to 1/3 speed while doing it was
a matter for discussion.  (Yes, one-third speed: our printer used an
oscillating typebar, and you had to send it a blank line image between
the two copies to be overprinted.  If the bar wasn't going the same
direction when printing the two copies, the result would look smudged.)

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