Is printing PDF to a dot matrix printer is possible?

A terminological point, in US jargon these are called "multi-part forms," while the pros who print them often refer to them as "NCR forms."

My wife recently worked for an administration where the powers that be wanted to sign purchase orders just once.  That is to say, if she submitted 4 copies on different colored sheets (to imitate the standard colors for an NCR form) it would be refused out of hand.  The usual workaround was to peel apart the NCR form, print each sheet separately on a laser, and then staple them together again; note when the laser heats the NCR forms the fumes they give off are said to be toxic.  She managed to get a dot-matrix printer for her office, but getting it to work (under WinXP?) wasn't point-and-click -- in part because dot-matrix printers have certain "peculiarities".

I used to print on NCR forms all the time, primarily FedEx labels: it took a while to get the spacing right on a template, but with that in hand I could fill in the address details and dump it to the printer from the DOS prompt (with "copy mylabel.txt/b lpt1").  I could even use Chinese, having written a routine (in Turbo Pascal) for converting a 24x24 bitmap Chinese font to Epson LQ graphics commands.  Surely barcodes would be simpler.  I haven't checked all my archives, but the latest label I could find quickly dates from 1996.

Yes, Win7 still comes with a driver for EpsonLQ-compatible dot-matrix machines, and the latter can achieve 360 dpi when all the pins are working.  But I'm not sure this would work reliably on a barcode, especially if scaling is involved: relative thickness matters, and what happens when one of the thinner bars falls on a pixel/pin boundary?  Unless you go pretty big, the safest route might be to convert images of the barcodes to EpsonLQ yourself.  All so you can get a barcode that you can scan back into a computer?

I suspect coming up with a process incorporating dot-matrix printers will not be easy or inexpensive.  And how long will it be before your invoicing goes all-electronic?

Good luck,

David

Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat can print to any print device on Windows or Macintosh for which a standard print driver is available. That having been said, depending upon the number of pins on the print head, their effective resolution, and the ability of the print driver to address the pins individually, the output may or may not be particularly useful.

Have you actually tried this or is this a hypothetical question?

          - Dov

It's unlikely to work well, or at all. The resolution of a dot matrix is fine for text setting at carefully chosen sizes, but in a PDF everything is printed as graphics and there just isn't the resolution for that.

There are continuous feed laser printers (if that's what you mean by 4 fold), designed for industrial scale printing. PDF isn't ideal for these either because they are optimized for very high speed flows with specialist software, but some of them can do PDF.