USPS Form 2976 and filePro

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>Bill Campbell, the prominent pundit, on Wed, Jan 12 12:42  while half 
>mumbling half-witicized: 
>
>> On Wed, Jan 12, 2005, Walter Vaughan wrote:
>> >Is anyone filling out Customs Declarations form CP72 (also known as USPS 
>> >Form 2976-A) with filePro? We need to generate it with a Laser printer 
>> >rather than someone typing it manually on a 5 part form.
>
>> That's what Radio Shack Daisy Wheel II printers are for :-).
>
>And lately I've noticed posts from people who have those and can't
>get print wheels for them.  They were OEM from Ricoh who was making
>them years before they got an RS badge put on them.  That makes
>that model 30 years old now.

At least 24 years old as I was selling them in 1980.  They sure were work
horses though, and much faster than Diablos and other daisy wheels
available at the time.

>On multiple forms in filePro I just use multiple print statements
>in a loop statement and would change one variable between each
>print and pass through the loop.

I do much the same, but send the print job to the printer with the number
of copies specified (e.g. lp -n 2 ... for two copies).

>One instance the forms were identical except the light ghost image
>on top that said Original, File , Employee.

That's a slightly different twist.

>Dot matrix printers that handle many pages are available but take a
>bit of looking.   Multi-part forms means everything is done at
>once.  Multiple sheets in a laser printer mean assembling the
>sheets afteward and taking more time to print them.

If you're doing large numbers of forms, there are some industrial strength
dot matrix printers available from genicom, Tally (nee Mannesmann Tally),
and others.  Expect industrial strength pricing as well.  One thing I like
particularly about the Tally printers is that they use ANSI escape
sequences for printer control instead of character strings that may well
interfere with terminals doing pass-through printing.

Bill
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