What is the proper font for printing on thermal paper?

Question

I have a program that prints every client's order, like restaurants tickets, but I made it with times new roman. The result wasn't a quality print. I believe that the font is not the best for this tech and I have to convince my client the owner, cause he loves that font.

Would sans serif or similar be the better choice?

Also, is there a standard procedure for printing direct to those thermal printers and choose the internal fonts, whatever the manufacturer is?

I am using QuickReports to create the printing. The result is king of blur. I will put the pictures to compare as soon as I put my hands on a scanner.

Solution

Selecting the optimal print font is both subjective and technical. Not all fonts are suitable to small-dpi mediums; Some fonts use highly variable line width when painting the letters and that will "smudge" easily when used with smudge-prone mediums; I guess the thermal printer fits into both "small dpi" and "easily smudged" areas.

In my opinion the selected font should be, based on priority:

• The device fonts: don't print graphics to tiny printers, use the on-board fonts and learn the "escape" language. Results will be outstanding, and there's enough flexibility to also get beautiful results. The only time I had to deal with a thermal printer I used this method and the results really are great. The device allows font scaling, drawing lines, almost everything you'd need. But it is hard work and you'll be outside of the "comfort zone". The printer driver is not helping you at all and you end up writing device-specific routines.
• Next option would be BITMAP fonts. That is, don't use True Type Fonts. On today's computers bitmap fonts only serve one purpose: look good at small pixels count. That's perfect for a small-dpi printer.
• Invest millions in developing a special purpose font that's easy to read on paper and behaves good printed on whatever device. Or use the font others have spent millions in developing: open your favorite version of Ms Word, type a few words and see what font is used. Right now I get Calibri.
• Use a font that doesn't have fancy strokes that need many pixels to paint OR make smudges more obvious. Write something in Times New Roman in very large font. See the fancy lines, the narrow segments, the elegant design? That's not a good choice for a small-dpi, smudge-prone printer. Now do the same for Arial, Verdana, Tahoma.
• Let the user choose. This decision is only partly technical, there might be subjective reasons to use one thing or the other.

Comments

[afrazier]

You can also get a list of the on-board printer fonts by looking at TPrinter.Fonts and removing the fonts that also exist in TScreen.Fonts. Using those fonts in reports on the OP's thermal printer should improve print speed and quality dramatically without having to resort to raw, device specific output. I've done exactly this with dot-matrix printers before.

[Jerry Dodge]

I would move the last one about letting the user choose a bit higher up the list, since the user may already have hundreds of their own fonts which they wish to choose from. It's still a valuable point to default the fonts to a more generic selection though. I would personally try out Consolas.

[Cosmin Prund]

@JerryDodge, if the user truly really has hundreds of fonts installed then it's not exactly an "average user", and given it's passion for fonts, that bullet will move all the way to position one, and if the printer can't cope with that then the user gets a new printer. More realistically the user only has windows-default fonts and doesn't really understand all the talk about small dpi. The developer should choose a default font that works well, only then allow the user to mess with the settings.

[Jerry Dodge]

@CosminPrund That's exactly what I was trying to say, but in more brief words. "It's still a valuable point to default the fonts to a more generic selection though."