Forms Printers

Multi-part Forms (4-6 plies)

The creation of 2- and 3-part forms using carbonless paper is a common application for customers of high speed Xerox printers, especially the DocuTech series of 135ppm printers. Xerox sells paper coated with chemical-containing capsules specifically for use in Xerox machines. Most major paper mills sell their own coated transfer paper with 20# (CB, CF) and 22# (CFB) basis weight, which is ideal for 3-part forms and suitable for some 4-part forms. Often, however, legibility on the 4th ply is marginal. Transferred marks may be light and difficult to read, primarily because 22# paper is too thick to transfer enough pressure through all of the plies. None of these papers are intended for multi-part forms with 5- or 6- parts, since the bottom plies almost certainly will be unreadable.

Yet, 20-30% of the forms market worldwide continues to need 4-, 5- and even 6- part forms. The advantages of printing forms On Demand pertain just as much to a 5-part form as to a 2-part form. Forms printers can gain a competitive advantage with faster turnaround on new and changed forms, and reduce their costs of warehousing and obsolescence, by using Xerox printers to satisfy the demand for 4- to 6-part forms. The solution is to print these forms on Xerox high speed printers adapted for Lightweight paper, because a thinner substrate means that the carbonless paper will transfer pressure through more plies. For comparison, the carbonless papers used on sheet fed offset presses to produce forms up to 6-parts are typically 15# (top, bottom) and 17# (middle plies).

Multi-part Forms (2 or more plies)

Regardless of how many plies a multi-part form may have, it will be printed on pre-collated stock. Consequently, any error made by the pre-collation equipment will cause an image to be placed on the wrong sheet, so the current and all subsequent unit sets will be incorrectly printed. Manual procedures to check for pre-collation errors prior to printing are ineffective and slow.

The only foolproof way to ensure that the expected image is printed on the correct piece of paper is to validate, in the printer, in "real time", that the intended piece of paper was printed with the correct image. This is precisely what XSIS does with the Feed Assurance Feature (FAF). With FAF, the Goldenrod that is marked "Shipping" at the bottom really will be Shipping's copy -- not Accounting's or Manufacturing's. And instead of throwing away all of the unit sets that will be incorrectly printed following one out-of-sequence sheet, FAF catches the error immediately so the problem can be fixed immediately and the print job resumed.

Unusual Size Forms

For forms that are trimmed to small dimensions, XSIS offers improved imposition using a Large Format printing capability that may increase total throughput and reduce cost per page. For example, a form that is 4.5"x 6" (final size) can be printed 9-up by using oversize paper, instead of only 6-up on 17" wide paper.

Some "oversize" forms can be printed without modification on the Large Format printer (for example, the 2% of all forms that are 12"x18").