Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a simple markup language.
It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s.
Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.
It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s.
Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.