  The utilization of a $d$-level partially entangled state, shared by two
parties wishing to communicate classical information without errors over a
noiseless quantum channel, is discussed. We analytically construct
deterministic dense coding schemes for certain classes of non-maximally
entangled states, and numerically obtain schemes in the general case. We study
the dependency of the information capacity of such schemes on the partially
entangled state shared by the two parties. Surprisingly, for $d>2$ it is
possible to have deterministic dense coding with less than one ebit. In this
case the number of alphabet letters that can be communicated by a single
particle, is between $d$ and 2d. In general we show that the alphabet size
grows in "steps" with the possible values $ d, d+1, ..., d^2-2 $. We also find
that states with less entanglement can have greater communication capacity than
other more entangled states.
