Microsoft KB Archive/59259

Draft, NLQ, and Letter Quality on Dot-Matrix Printers

PSS ID Number: Q59259 Article last modified on 11-02-1994

1.00 1.15 2.00 2.01 3.00 3.10 3.11 4.00 5.00 5.50 6.00

MS-DOS

= SUMMARY =

Draft mode is the default mode of most dot-matrix printers and of Microsoft printer drivers (PRDs). Pica, PicaD, Elite, and EliteD are all draft fonts. Fonts that have a “D” at the end denote “doublestrike,” which is NOT the same thing as Near Letter Quality (NLQ) or Letter Quality. Doublestrike prints the same dots twice.

NLQ is a feature that is available on most 9-pin dot-matrix printers. The printer has an internal bitmap of each character. On the first strike, it prints a portion of the bitmap, and fills it in on the second strike. This makes a total of 18 dots-per-character resolution in NLQ as opposed to only 9 in draft mode.

Letter Quality is available only on 24-pin dot-matrix printers. It may be either single pass or double pass.

As a general rule, all fonts except Pica, PicaD, Elite, and EliteD are either NLQ or Letter Quality, depending on whether the printer is 9 or 24 pin.

The most common reason for not getting the correct mode is usually that the text is not correctly formatted for the corresponding font. Make sure that the text is properly highlighted and then select the appropriate font from the “font name:” field of the Format Character menu.

KBCategory: kbother KBSubcategory: Additional reference words:

=
================================================================ Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1994.