please help, printing on forms.

[tommtomm]

Hi all,
I am in a bit of a jam and I hope someone out there might have an idea of how to do this.

Is there a printer out there that can really print on forms accuratly?

I just started work at a recruitment company and they send out 4-5 CRB applications a day. the applications have to be filled out in black ink, capitals and each letter HAS to be within the boxes.

As I am dealing with doctors who are not the brightest of people lets face it, most of them get rejected, as they have used blue ink, lower case, out of the boxs or a thousand other stupid mistakes.

Do you know of a printer that I can feed in a a4/a3 form and have the printer correctly print within the boxes. My experiance has taught me that feeders are not always accurate, and lighning up the sheets into the printer will be a nightmare in the long run.

Is there a printer out there that can really print on forms accuratly?

Any help and I will love you forever.

Butch Tom

[redcow]

I do a lot of work on printers at the State of California. Various departments. What they do is just print the entire form on the printer.
I'm not sure what your goal is. Is it to have the stupid doctors do all their lettering on a blank piece of paper and then feed it in to the printer and then print little boxes around their letters?


Yeh, that'll work!

[tommtomm]

Ah sorry for the confusion.
In the UK we have a police check to authorise doctors to work. This is to make sure they have no criminal record.
To do this, the police send an A3 page- 4side A4 to us, we fill in the details,
We then send it to the doctors for them to fill their section, sign it at the bottom and then send it back to us. We check that they have filled it correctly. ie. Capital letter, black ink, In the boxes and without them missing something out. As the police only accept 10% rejections before we get a warning.
Therefore I am making an online form for the doctors to fill in. I get all the details, I fill in all the form correctly and then I just post it to the doctors for them to sign it.
What I would like is that when they fill in the online form I can just press print, and have a printer take the empty form and fill it in for us.
The police will not accept anything other than their form.
So I will nto be able to just reprint the form.(Sad I know it would have been much easier.)
Again thanks for the response, any help would be great.
Thanks
Tom

[redcow]

OK now we're onto something.
In order for the doctors to get work authorization they have to fill out the police form. Correctly.

The docs then send the form back to you.
You guys inspect the form before sending it in to the police.
If it doesn't pass inspection, You reject it and send another form to the doctor. Now one of three things will happen 1. the doc fills it out correctly, this time. It goes to the police and the doc can work.2. The doc fills it in incorrectly again, you reject it again, no work for the doc. 3. You repeat the process again until sh*t for brains realizes that he isn't making any money, and starts filling in forms correctly.

I still think that you can scan the form into a computer as a PDF, fill out, and check boxes and then send the form to the doctor with a black pen. Have him sign it and send it in.

Or you fill in the original form, after getting the answers from the doc. Mail it to the doc with a black pen, then he signs it.

[tommtomm]

Thanks for the reply.
yes your seeing what I am up against.
As I send roughly 6-7 forms a day, filling it out myself after I get all the information from an online form will make sure it is done correctly but it also means its still a slow and to be honest tedious job and so using a printer is the only viable way to do this in the long run.
I found an Epson dot matrix.
http://www.epson.co.uk/Printers-and-All-In-Ones/Dot-Matrix/Epson-LQ-300+II
they told me that the good thing with this printer is that you are able to setup the alignment manualy, so that you are 100% sure that it prints in the right place every time.
Has anyone used anything like this in the past, do you think this would be the ideal printer. Does Hp have a printer like this?

The next step would be after I print the form all I would need is get the doctor to sign and date it and thats it job done.

again thanks for the help.

[choco]

This is rather tricky. I think the best solution is to give out an electronic form. That way, you can print the form without any difficulty.