Printing carbon forms with dot matrix okidata printer

Question

Creating an app to fill out some government forms using PHP (cakephp). The forms have about 4 layers for all the necessary parties to get a carbon copy. Which is why a dot matrix printer is being used.

Here's an example form: Manifest Example: Designated Facility to Destination State (PDF) (1 pg, 93K)

Should I create a PDF based on the layout of the form and print? Or should I be trying to create a PNG or some sort of print CSS/HTML page? I've experimented with TCPDF, which is a PHP PDF class - but I'm worried I'm overcomplicating things - not to mention, it takes quite a while to line everything up correctly with this class. And, it seems like it could get cumbersome creating PDFs just to trash them after the form has been printed. We're printing about a 100 of these a day.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Chances are that this printer is Epson FX-80 command compatible. You should be able to generate a text file with the correct escape sequences, then raw dump it to the printer port. This is how we did things back in the day before Windows.