: What does "draft font" mean? What does "draft font" mean? How does it differ from other Fonts? I have been looking a fonts and keep seeing this designation. I thought this meant draft in the

@Sarah814

It was a time when desktop computers were taken into wide use, but printing onto paper was not how it is now. Printers were noisy dot matrix types.

Dot matrix printers could print fast or slowly. It depended on how dense and sharp result was wanted. Dense and sharp looking output (=Letter quality) took ages to print and the color ribbon lasted maybe only for 10...20 pages.

Printing at rate 100 characters per second or even more was possible in draft mode. It was used when fast output and ink economy were important (a joblist, proofreading, long inventory lists) and the font output quality was less.

In draft mode a sparse draft font was used. It was not Times Roman or Helvetica because those were not readable when printed with sparse needle hits. Draft fonts were optimized for few, sparse and not especially black dots.

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