Thanks for the references Dave!
LightBurn has 10 built in dithering/toning algorithms which are quite good. If I need something fancier that allows for black dots to turn into a grayscale I'll typically go to a Photoshop library or even those in GIMP. Back in the 80's I worked with some of the people now at HP who worked on that stuff. Fascinating!
You are right in that it works just like a laser printer, though I'm limited to about 300 dpi.