@federicomena @penguin42 @maco I've been looking into these 9-pin Epson manuals recently for an unrelated reason, and I found something really weird. When printing high quality ("NLQ") text they print two passes with the second pass offset to half the distance between dots from the first pass.
But when you're using graphics mode, you can only step the paper by multiples of 1/3 the distance between dots - not 1/2.
Super weird.
The technical service manuals for some of these printers are on archive.org, and I found one that sort of explains it. When printing NLQ text they step the paper one *and a half* steps, but holding the stepper motor on a half step is less reliable and appears to use more power than holding on a whole step. So I guess they didn't want to include a command that let someone half step the motor and just leave it there.