Printing TrueType Fonts on Line Printers

We at Tally have always recommended that customers use the Tally printer-resident fonts when possible, because that will give them the best output print quality.  However, we also know that customers sometimes need to print in a font that is smaller than 12pt, and Windows does its best to render TrueType fonts faithfully on the Tally printer.  Some fonts look better than others (more on this below).

Microsoft Windows itself does the job of converting TrueType fonts to raster graphics that can be printed by the printer.  Any print application that uses the Windows driver, including the Printer Test Page, is rasterized by Windows, using the information provided in the Windows driver.  This Windows rasterizer also converts the TrueType fonts from their 600x600 dpi default resolution to the much coarser 60x96 dpi default resolution supported by the Tally printer.  If you change the default graphic resolution in the Driver Settings, the Windows rasterizer output looks different.  Setting the graphic resolution to 120x72 dpi gives you a somewhat better-looking printed font, albeit at a slower rate of print.

Microsoft uses different default font sizes in different versions of Windows.  If you print a Windows 95/98/NT test page, the default font is Courier 12pt; the resultant print output looks great.  In the Windows 2000/XP test page, the default font is Courier 10pt; this font is rendered quite poorly.  Windows makes the Courier 10pt font print smaller than you would think it should; it looks like 8pt when printed!

An 8pt TrueType font can look very bad when printed on a Tally line printer.  In fact, some 8pt TrueType fonts look better than others when printed on the Tally printer.  The better fonts to use for 8pt or 10pt are Arial (for alpha characters) and Verdana (for numeric characters).