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I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount. It's hard to make out the dots in the photo, but I'd guess this is probably around a 24-pin, printing in near-letter-quality (NLQ) mode, and (barely) doing true descenders. Note how straight the vertical lines of the line-drawing-character box at the top. If it was alternating printing one line while moving the printhead to the right, then the next line while moving printhead left, the slight imprecision of the drive in many printers would tend to be visible when the pixels of the line don't quite line up. Or if it's doing NLQ mode, it might be printing bidirectionally on the same line, overlapping dots, and might be more forgiving. I would guess this model probably has features like italic and bold (or at least double-strike), maybe condensed, double-wide, toggle from 10cpi and 12cpi, etc. And you can usually mix those within a page, like you know that you can print twice as many characters horizontally at condensed in just a small spot of the page, and do the layout arithmetic based on that. That printer might also do bitmaps, and/or let you define characters. If you can't find the doc for a particular model, but it might be some degree of Epson-compatible, search for "epson esc/p printer" documentation, and see what codes work. And know about form-feed, for a smooth finish to your page. Or, if you you just want to treat it as an 80x66-character array, but get a little fancy within that, in a one-hour project, you can make a shell script that fetches data with Curl, generate HTML, and pipe it through something like `w3m` or `elinks` for formatting. Or use Svelte and pull in 100 packages from NPM to print to the vintage thing. For a more telegram-y aesthetic, you might be able to source yellow paper (search keywords "tractor-feed", "continuous form"), preferably unperforated. For more computer-y, search keyword "greenbar". A 9-pin or similar printer will look more vintage than the crisp one in the article, or you can try running a 24-pin in draft/fast mode. |
In the video, you can see it's doing both of the techniques you mentioned: each line in printed in 2 passes, both in the same direction, presumably for better alignment. But the next line is printed in the opposite direction, again with 2 passes.
In the 1980s, I had first a 9-pin printer (Star SG10) and then a 24-pin printer (NEC P6)