A drive circuit (100) for driving actuators of a printhead (97) from a common drive waveform has a switching circuit (32) for coupling the common drive waveform to an actuator (1,2), and a timing circuit (10) to control the switching circuit to form a drive pulse from the common drive waveform. The drive pulse is trimmed by controlling a duration (TTRIM) of a step at an intermediate level (VHOLD) in the drive pulse. This can improve the trade-off between available range of trimming and thermal efficiency because the voltage drop across the switching circuit can be reduced, compared to trimming only the height. Decoupling during a flat portion of the common drive waveform can enable the timing of the decoupling to be more relaxed compared to decoupling during a slope. Such relaxing can enable costs, complexity and thermal loading to be reduced.