Continuous Form Paper

The continuous form paper, continuous printing paper or continuous stationery paper (short: continuous paper; also tabulating paper) was formerly used by printers such as dot-matrix printers or uni-hammer printers to print text and graphics, especially lists or tables, from a computer.

It has been used in computer technology since about 1969, although it was invented as early as 1910 for autographic registers.

Likewise, printers of the earlier years until about the early 1990s had paper feeders (also known as tractor feeders) for continuous paper with separable guide hole edges. Since listings of programs were often printed out, the continuous paper was designed line by line in two colours (e.g. green/white or blue/white), so that the printout of listings, lists or tables was a bit clearer.

Advantages

• Easy paper feeding and guiding in the printer.
• One-time setup of the fanfold paper stack (for several 1,000 sheets!).
• Printing of banners of any length possible (with appropriate software!).
• Use of continuous forms in computer centres at large companies (but pre-fabricated forms and corresponding software must be set up or coordinated!)
• Paper width can be variably adjusted with the appropriate feeder, e.g. for printing continuous labels, depending on the printer model up to the width of the DIN A2 sheet format.
• With fixed perforation of the guide hole edge, simply file in folders or bind.
• Special types of continuous paper are 2, 3 or more layers to make good copies or carbon copies faster. Since the lateral perforation of multi-ply continuous paper holds all the sheet layers together, the carbon copy cannot slip.

Disadvantages

• There are also different paper widths.
• Not necessarily suitable for letters or other correspondence.
• If there is a paper malfunction in the printer, often more printer paper is damaged or unusable than with single sheet feeding.
• If the fanfold paper is set up incorrectly: skewed printouts up to paper disturbance in the printer!
• Endless paper is often thinner than single sheet paper, which results in the paper being cut off at the perforations: Damage to the printing paper.

Links

Wikipedia: Continuous_stationery