>Ed,
>
>I'd have to agree that in your case, the dedicated soultion seems like the way to go.
>
Now take this one step further - plan on the dedicated approach when doing the design, and then see if it can be avoided conveniently and cost-effectively, not just the hardware costs, but the cost of ongoing development and maintenance headaches. Let's assume a minimally compliance sensitive form like an airline ticket - the form allows for a lot of play in the alignment. If alignment is off and it is generated one up, and it's a financial document, like an airline ticket, what is the cost of blowing the form output. When I did this for a charter flight brokerage in the mid-1980s, it was almost $2.00/Form (ticket). This made the charter agency staff unhappy that they had to sit and do some QA on output (a box of forms from the airline held ~1500 tickets) until one night during a test run we went out to dinner with a box of just plain paper and didn't set he QA interval. We got back from a nice dinner, found a stack of what would've been $2300 in tickets that were a line and a half off of tolerance...but it was just a $20 box of plain paper cut to ticket size. Never got a complaint again about babysitting a ticket run frm the people who went to dinner that evening.
When the airlines started accepting a thermal form, the client switched to a much more reliably, more expensive thermal printer that didn't buck like the DEC LA50 chain printers, and just about paid for itself (in quiet alone - these were the old DEC LA50 chain printers!)
Shipping in the US, especially multicarrier shipping, package barcoding and the like makes dedicated printers a smart investment. If UPS or RPS gets one of 'their' shipping systems in house, you can bet the other one won't accept the same format of barcode. And contrary to polular belief, you can't get really reiable barcode quality out of a dot or inket label printer - we use the thin-film ribbon stuff because it's fast, and the thermal stuff is accurate and consistent.
>Cheers,
>
>Andrew
