In some cases, users want to use the GDI printer driver when there's no PCL printer available, such as for faxing. But sometimes, the print quality is not as good as with the PCL driver. To understand why, it helps to understand how the printer drivers work with fonts.
In the Windows world, users often use TrueType fonts. Windows printer drivers create bitmap representations of those fonts as needed from the information contained in the TrueType fonts during printing. These programs try to make the printer look like the screen.
To the system, the user usually dictates that fonts that already reside on a Xerox printer be used. This gives the system the challenge of working backward from those fonts and trying to represent the output on the screen. The system tries to make the screen look like the printer, not the other way around. We can convert Xerox bitmap fonts to PCL bitmap fonts without too much trouble, but we do not have the technology to create TrueType screen fonts from Xerox or PCL fonts. Even if we did, there are licensing issues.
GDI print quality correlates to the fonts used for display, compared with the attributes describing those fonts. What you see on the screen is how GDI print will look. So, the key to improving GDI print is to improve the fonts used in the display system, and to match substitutions, attributes, character widths, and scaling attributes. Some of this can be improved by making sure the font widths and family names are correct.
There are INI options you can use to improve the substitutions, if you cannot match the names. For the best results, use screen fonts that match exactly.
The system comes with a set of TrueType fonts that match the included printer fonts. Install and use these fonts if possible. If, however, you are working backward from an end-user's existing fonts, you will have to get the matching fonts or use fonts that are similar.
Xerox can create PostScript fonts from Metacode fonts for you. There are tools that will convert a PostScript font to a TrueType font. With the proper fonts installed, and with the proper FXR settings, GDI print will match the bitmap font print quality very closely.
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