Dot Matrix Printer for Word Rolls
By Bill Jelen
When I first started doing rolls for Bam-Bam Music Rolls, I experimented printing the words using a dot matrix printer. I bought a Panasonic KXP- 1123 specifically because it had a 11.5" paper path and could accomodate the roll. To print the lyrics, I would totally unwind the roll, and then feed the roll through starting at the end of the roll. Thus, the lyrics would print on the right side of the paper in the proper location.
The printer was controlled with a Qbasic program that I wrote. Since the roll was cut on the Tonnessen's perf which runs around 523 steps per foot, I used the BASIC program to send codes to the printer which would let me advance the paper by 1/72 of an inch. Here are the issues I ran into:
(1) It is slow! 25 feet of paper is like printing 26 pages on a dot matrix printer. Sure, there are only 15-20 words per page, but it is still time-consuming.
(2) You have to worry about the paper skewing left to right.
(3) The wax paper of the roll is slippery and you are relying on friction to keep it going through. My experience found that after 25 feet of roll, the lyrics became mis-aligned by 2 inches. Thus, if the lyrics started on the tracker bar, by the beginning of the roll, the lyric was at the top of the spool box.
(4) The D-Ring at the front of the roll will *not* fit through the platen of the KXP-1123. Thus, you either need to roll the roll back through, or order the roll without the end-tab installed and attach the end tab after printing the roll.
I've seen the QRS high speed stencil machine put the words on their rolls in about 2 seconds. The dot-matrix solution is painfully slow, comparatively.
By the way, I remember one conversation I had with Bob Berkman at QRS: He remarked that he would like to use the dry wax paper that Richard Tonnessen uses, but the ink from the high speed stencil machine smears terribly on that paper.
Bill Jelen
[ Editors comments:
[
[ I think PlayRite Music Rolls still uses a variation of the "alcohol
[ conversion" technique for offset printing; the ink is quite volatile
[ so that it dries quickly, and on the waxed paper the appearance is a
[ watery green.
[
[ By the way, I'm sure that QRS or the Tonnesen's could perforate
[ good-quality rag paper at extra cost. It could then be taped to
[ sprocketed paper for precise registration in the printer.
[
[ A 24-pin dot-matrix printer would nicely print _graphics_ images
[ (bit maps) of the lyrics after the image is rotated by software.
[ Richard Tonnesen makes rolls for me with annotation text "punched" in
[ the paper trailer; the skewed and rotated text is generated from the
[ bit-mapped image of a 7x9 (12-pt) font.
[
[ Robbie Rhodes |
(Message sent Mon 13 Jan 1997, 17:31:00 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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