Enhancing Your Printing

Your printer’s DIP switches control the printing style of a whole document. Software commands, on the other hand, let you change anything from a single character to the entire document. By using software commands, you can obtain many different printing effects with the DFX-5000 printer, from arranging the text on the page to giving extra emphasis to particular words and phrases.

You can obtain many of the effects described in this section with your application program, but not all. For example, many word processing programs let you choose bold or underlined text, but do not have an option for printing double-wide text. And while some programs let you print an entire document in a typestyle such as italics or NLQ, many don’t let you select a particular typestyle for just one word or phrase. If your software program lets you insert printer commands in your document, you can be much more versatile in your printing.

Once you have read about some of the special features the DFX-5000 offers, you may want to check your software manual to see how you can use a particular feature. If your software lets you send printer commands, you can look up the command for the feature in the Command Summary in Chapter 8. To understand more about how your software communicates with your printer and how to send commands, see the section in this chapter on sending commands to the printer.

Print quality and fonts

The DFX-5000 has three levels of print quality: high-speed draft, normal draft, and NLQ (near letter quality). High-speed draft is ideal for rough drafts and large documents or reports that you need to print quickly. Normal draft is a bit slower, but offers higher resolution characters. Finally, NLQ takes a little longer, but produces darker, more fully formed characters suitable for presentation-quality documents.

4-2 Getting the Most from Your Printer