impact printer

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impact printer Any device that makes use of mechanical impact to print characters onto paper. Typewriters come within this definition but the term is not usually applied to machines that are only operated through a keyboard. A character may be formed by impacting an inked ribbon against the paper with an engraved type character, or it may be built up from a number of dots printed by the impacts of separate styluses. See solid-font printer, dot-matrix printer.

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