Before setting the fonts, try to determine which program with which settings handles the printing you want to adjust. See: Printing method used by mainframe print jobs (Where do I change my printer settings?)PrintingMethod. and Multiple printer configurations (Which printer do I have to set up?)PrintingConfig. The printer fonts are separate from the screen fonts. So changing your screen font to very large characters won’t make any difference on the printer for your screen prints. For every type of print job, you can specify different fonts.

New users often ask to have the “print to look exactly as it did before”. We recommend the “Direct” setting which will use the printer’s default font and will not reformat the printout in any way. In most cases this has solved the problem.

If the characters on printout appear on the wrong place, i.e. the neat column of figures on the right is not neatly under each other any more. This problem is mostly because you are printing with a variable width font where the space, the “W” and the “i” are of unequal width. The “Courier” or “Courier New” families of fonts should be used in most applications as they are fixed width.

The last two characters of each line are missing: Most terminals work with an 80-column display and many print jobs are configured for 80 characters per line. But laser printers can only print 78 columns on an A4 page with their default font size. The solution here is to use the “GDI” setting which allows you to select a font and size that suits your application.

To fit the printed data exactly on pre-printed stationary: It seems some dot-matrix printer and some sizes of stationary are very hard to reconcile. Sorry, we have not (yet) a golden bullet solution to this problem. Most of our customers do get a satisfactory setting by spending a lot of time in fine-tuning the font sizes and paper settings. To help you in fine tuning we have added an option to set the line spacing, top and left margins to the nearest 0.001mm with the “GDI” printing (if your printer supports such a fine resolution!).

More at: Printing general informationPrintingGenInf.

See also:
Font property pageHIDD_EMULFONTS for more about fonts
Character sets and translation tablestranslationTables