Driver quality was all over the map in the 3.1 era (even in the 98 era)

That is why some programs like Superprint or photoshop would allow you to directly choose the dithering mode.

Even my old Rainbow Dot Matrix has
Coarse
Fine
Error diffusion
In the printer setup

Most printers stuck with coarse which gives a lot of colors with a large rounded Dot pattern

For the content I printed (not photos) Fine was usually the best since the dot pattern was smallest.

Error diffusion to me usually looked terrible on the content I was printing (at low resolution ) And was at best hit or miss
but using Superprint which had dozens of different forms of error diffusion I could get it looking pretty good

That was incredibly helpful. I'm going to check out Superprint and see if it improves the output. My printer driver from Kodak has no such options -- really, really basic.

Two other issues. One, images often don't fill the page, or occasionally, will exceed the page. There doesn't seem to be an enlarge/scale option in the Windows print drivers. Did people have a way of printing graphics expanded to fit the page? The printer does have an expand graphics mode, but toggling it requires slowly reconfiguring it via *printed out* menus -- and it's likely either still not big enough or going to overshoot.

Second, the spacing comes out all wrong on even really simple ASCII art. I've tried printing direct from the gopher client and copying the text into Notepad and printing that.

radiounix wrote on 2020-08-01, 15:58:

That was incredibly helpful.
Two other issues. One, images often don't fill the page, or occasionally, will exceed the page. There doesn't seem to be an enlarge/scale option in the Windows print drivers. Did people have a way of printing graphics expanded to fit the page?

NP

And you are correct Until Windows XP Bitmap images were fixed at 72dpi No scaling outside your application software

It was assumed that if you wanted to do any serious printing You needed a program to layout your image. (Aka not right click print and not from paintbrush )

When I was a poor teenage small business operator and paintbrush was my “desktop publishing “ software I would simply drop my finished work into Microsoft Works for Windows

It allowed me to position and scale the image to my hearts content. I could even distort the image and use word art.

Many programs including paint shop should allow you to scale your image to fit your printable area.