Draft Font For Dot Matrix Printer

I have been wrestling with finding a proper font for quite a while now for my dot-matrix printing needs utilizing a POS printer which I decided to use for our Trip Ticket and Fuel Voucher issuances. The usage of a POS printer appeals to me because it saves money, paper, ink and time because there is never a need to cut a paper into several portions anymore, but the fonts I used to print those do not appeal to me.

So I said to myself, just this morning, the last recourse is to use the Draft Fonts (really named Draft Fonts) by trying to find out where those can come from. Meaning I tried installing a lot of Epson Dot Matrix printers hoping one of these can result to the installation of the much wanted Draft Fonts; and fails finding those again.

  1. Dot Matrix by Moonbase Press. In Techno LCD 505,337 downloads (84 yesterday) 100% Free - 2 font files. First seen on DaFont.
  2. I'm using a RDLC report in my app. I tried printing my RDLC in dot matrix printer' with the font 'Arial'. But, it isnot clear. Unable to differentiate numbers with this font. Please suggest me some suitable fonts which will be more readable when printed in Dot Matrix Printer. Thanks in advance.

Here is the output using Tahoma:
While the output is clear, simply looking at the colons you can immediately notice the alignment is not proper, and that is because Tahoma is a graphical font. Not to mention that it prints slower because it has more DPIs (Dots Per Inch) than the DOS fonts.

Draft Font For Dot Matrix Printer Setup

Alternately, we normally use Courier New because it represents the DOS style of printing albeit still graphical from within VFP or simply directly from Windows OS. Here is the result:

Draft Font For Dot Matrix PrinterBut then again, I know there are better alternatives with clearer print output. So I surfed the web and found two fonts that look promising:

But like the previous attempts, those are still graphical in nature with an attempt to give us a dot-matrix compatibility. While I salute the efforts made by the guys who have created those fonts and that those show us properly aligned characters on screen, I am sad to say that those do not also give us 'real' DOS text via simply looking again on the alignment of the colons of the result print output.
So I said to myself, just this morning, the last recourse is to use the Draft Fonts (really named Draft Fonts) by trying to find out where those can come from. Meaning I tried installing a lot of Epson Dot Matrix printers hoping one of these can result to the installation of the much wanted Draft Fonts; and fails finding those again. Until a thought hit me, I have been doing this wrong all along!
You see, what I have been doing (and I believe most of you are) is looking for fonts by checking those from inside maybe Word's dropdown list of fonts and testing a font on some words we typed inside a document; and not seeing what we need.
The Hidden Trick
We are not seeing those we sought because we are checking those via the dropdown list of fonts while our printer is still set to another non dot-matrix printer. The trick if you want to test and find the available draft fonts or its counterparts for a specific printer, is to temporarily set that printer you are attempting to use for DOS printing style as the Default Printer. Or simply from within Microsoft Word, change the printer into that. Because the dropdown list of fonts depends on the printer you are trying to use.
By changing the printer to my POS printer (Epson TM-U220D in my case) from within Word, I was able to see now the 'Draft font for dot matrix printer paperhidden' available fonts as shown in the image below:
And the output printing result is now this (using FontA11 and FontB21):

Available fonts varies with the printer you are 'currently' using. Keep that in mind and you won't have any more problem finding the proper fonts for your dot-matrix need in the future.
I hope this post has helped you in choosing the right fonts now for you dot-matrix printer use. Cheers!

Draft Font For Dot Matrix Printer Paper

1979_dot_matrix.ttf

Character map

Please use the pulldown menu to view different character maps contained in this font.

Basic font information

Copyright MJ Ahlers 2010
1979 Dot Matrix
Regular
FontStruct 1979 Dot Matrix
1979 Dot Matrix Regular
Version 1.0
Draft Font For Dot Matrix Printer
1979-Dot-Matrix
FontStruct is a trademark of FSI FontShop International GmbH
“1979 Dot Matrix” was built with FontStruct

Extended font information

Platforms supported

UnicodeUnicode 2.0 and onwards semantics, Unicode BMP only.

Font details

Revision1
Units per Em1024
Embedding rightsEmbedding for preview & printing allowed
WeightMedium (normal)
Mac styleBold
DirectionOnly strongly left to right glyphs + contains neutrals