This invention relates to an impact type printer having a plurality of print wires or hammers. Impact printers are well known in the prior art. As an example, a wire dot matrix printer, a typical impact printer has a plurality of solenoid-driven wires mounted within a movable print head which traverses a paper. During movement of the print head across the paper, selected solenoids are energized and drive the corresponding print wires to impact an inked ribbon and ultimately the paper to form dot-column patterns at closely spaced intervals across the print line. The print head utilizes seven or nine solenoid driven print wires and successively forms five or seven dot column patterns so as to form alphanumeric patterns.
Nowadays wire dot matrix printers are very popular because of their superior characteristics such as simplicity of the mechanism, high speed of solenoid operation, high reliability, and ability to make at the same time. Due to the popularization of readily usable computer systems, dot matrix printers functioning as output apparatus for such computer systems are required to have at least 16 print wires so as to print not only alphanumeric characters but also chinese characters and graphic patterns.