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I've been using Applixware 4.2 then 4.3 to write papers and such for a year and a half. Bear in mind that I've only used the Words module, not anything else.
In many ways Applixware is a superb program. Great interface, great looks, multiple-language support, including dictionaries and thesauruses (important for a Spanish major like me). The only major deficiencies are 1) inadequate filters support (Word 6/7 import and export is pretty buggy; I hear 4.4.1 will do a much better job, and handle Word97 too) and 2) missing some basic features like a simple way to do single/double spacing (you have to type in the measurements yourself).
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Another notable omission is word count; I used a macro as substitute.
Despite the flaws (4.4.1 did not fix the inability to do simple line spacing, and I was told by the company that there were no plans to change this), Applixware was good enough. I produced .rtf files that I printed via Word on campus laser printers, and .pdf files for job applications during senior year.
These are built-in fonts available so the simplest devices/OS like DOS can directly print per-character (ASCII) rather than per-pixel or per-dot. You send it the signal to print an upper case letter for instance, it responds and prints the upper case letter about like a daisy-wheel printer would have done. No dots involved in the communication between the PC and the printer, other than the trigger that makes it print the right letter on the paper.
Printing per-dot was graphics mode, the PC has to send every single dot to the printer but that's what you need for real pictures.
After a while fonts appeared which you loaded in the PC, which would then send every one of their dots to the printer in graphics mode, so there was a lot fancier text output available. But it was fiddly and didn't always work right, and by that time there were newer printers having lots of those typewriter-style fonts built in. Those who couldn't get the fonts installed into their PC correctly, for the old MX and FX printers to print all fancy like the few real geeks were doing, just got a new printer instead and their office correspondence went from these bare-bones Epson fonts to pseudo-letter-quality just plugging in the new printer.
Windows 3.1 made it a little easier to get the auxiliary DOS fonts going, but people mostly had gotten newer printers by then.
By the time Windows 95 came out very few of these old printers were still being used, but there were plenty of True-Type fonts built into Windows by then, plus the built-in drivers for such old printers were very mature.
So it was never really very common knowledge, but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody.
I am happy to report that I was doing the same thing in 1986 with GEOS on Commodore 64! And again in 1990 with PC/GEOS on Tandy 1000!
(Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)