I had the commodore 64 which had a bit more memory than the VIC-20. But still, a few pages of text in ascii was about the max you could manage with that (a few thousand words at best). These things weren't that great for word processing. Also features like "saving" and tapes as the main storage medium made using them slightly risky.
Hmmmm... I don't remember the exact matrix printer I had (some Epson probably) and it wasn't 8-bit but 16-bit era but I remember making very nice (for the time) D&D character sheets on the Amiga. Sure it wasn't a 1200 DPI laser printer but it was still cool.
The Apple ImageWriter II was a 9-in dot-matrix printer and already allowed to print nice things.
The only thing it couldn't do was shingling to increase the apparent resolution/density of the prints.
I remember the Juki daisy wheel we had hooked to our AT&T PC6300 running the Q&A word processor. I think you could buy different type faces but my father only ever bought the standard typewriter font.
The Citizen 200GX dot matrix we had afterward was a game changer especially with the color ribbon kit and the ability to print color graphics from paint in Win 3.1 was amazing.
This makes me nostalgic for tractor feed paper - both of the above printers had the tractor feeder option. My father bought a friggin skid of tractor feed on the cheap in the 80's for home and business so for years we had infinite paper supply until lasers and ink jets did away with tractor feeding.
But the VIC-20 screen is painful to look at. Personally, I use an Apple //e with WordStar.
20 column text was. Dear god. So awful.