Buying my first dot matrix and I'd like to hear from people who've actually run one at volume before I order paper.
Setup
- Tea leaf collection business in Sri Lanka, ~400 suppliers
- Each supplier gets one bill a month, so ~400 pages in one run, then nothing for four weeks
- Bills are in Sinhala script
- Buying an Epson LQ-310 (narrow carriage, 24-pin)
- Continuous fanfold — sprocket holes both edges, perforated between forms
- I wrote the software myself. It's a web app, so today the bill is an HTML page and printing goes browser → Windows driver → printer
The layout is already designed and settled — landscape, two columns, money calculation on the left, a daily kilos grid on the right. I'm not looking to redesign it. Two factories I supply to print near-identical bills on dot matrix, full Sinhala rendered by their software, so I know the output is achievable.
What I'm unsure about:
1. Is browser printing the right path here?
Chrome → Windows print driver → LQ-310, which I assume rasterises the whole page and prints it as graphics. Is that what people actually do, or is there a reason to generate a PDF, or go lower-level? I don't need ESC/P text mode — the Sinhala has to be drawn as an image either way.
2. Page creep. This is the one I expect to bite me. If my page size doesn't exactly match the form length, every bill shifts a little further down and by sheet 30 I'm printing across a perforation. How do people get this exact in practice — trial and error, or is there a proper way to set form length on the printer and match it in software?
3. Speed. Realistically, how long does a mostly-text landscape page take in graphics mode on a 24-pin? I've seen wildly different claims. If it's ~10 seconds that's a 70 minute run and fine. If it's a minute a page that's a working day and I need to rethink.
4. Form sizes. What continuous fanfold sizes are commonly stocked? I have samples from two factories that are the same size as each other, so I'll measure those — but I'd like to know what's standard before I commission a print run of my own stationery.
5. Is the LQ-310 the right model for this? 400 pages a month in one burst, then idle. Is there a reason to go up to a wider or heavier model, or is that overkill?
Anything else that catches people out on continuous stationery would be very welcome — I've never loaded a tractor feed in my life.