There are essentially two kinds of printers that work with Finale: PostScript-equipped printers, suitable for professional publishing; and non-PostScript printers, including inkjet and bubblejet printers.
Finale’s output truly shines when you print on a PostScript printer. PostScript is a page-description language spoken by computers and printers, just as MIDI is a language spoken by computers and MIDI keyboards. (If you want truly typeset-quality printing, you can take your Finale files on a disk to an output shop—something like a copy shop/graphics service bereau—and have it printed on a Linotronic imagesetter, a very expensive PostScript machine that creates published-quality printouts.)
Just as A, B, and C are characters in a standard text font, notes and musical symbols are characters in Finale’s music font, called Maestro. Maestro, and the other fonts that with Finale, are provided as Postscript and TrueType fonts.
All text and musical symbols should look outstanding at any size. However, when you print at reduced sizes, a non-PostScript printer produces unevenly spaced staff lines, slightly “stairstepped” eighth-note beams, or somewhat jagged slurs (because these lines and shapes are actually graphics and not font items).
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