(Eventually the middle will stretch due to repeated impact, but I usually get 3 or 4 rejuvenations, for a total of 10 passes or so, before a ribbon becomes unusable.) The solvent will redistribute the ink from the margins of the ribbon into the active portion in the middle, so it'll be good for a few more passes. Handy tip: You can rejuvenate dried-out or spent ribbons by opening the top, lightly fogging the scrunched-up ribbon with WD-40, and letting it sit for a day or so. It works fine in a CMD window under XP, with the printer plugged into LPT1. Now they're all retiring and there's nobody to replace them.Īlfred, I just picked up a couple dot matrix printers on Craigslist and ran some test banners using Bannerific. I used to buy art supplies at a shop where all the old signpainters hung out, I learned more about typography and how to do oil paintings properly from these old guys than I ever learned in college while doing my BFA.

What is truly disappearing: handpainted signs, and signpainters. There are plenty of sign-making places that have machines to cut stencils for silk-screening onto canvas, they look like traditional old-style banners but they have distinctively bad computer-ish typography, stuff no self-respecting signpainter would ever do. These long banners are just expensive enough to produce here in the US that the users tend to mount them on backing board, so they look like signs, and they don't tend to be several stories tall like in Japan, they are smaller scale for indoor presentation.īut I see plenty of regular fabric horizontal banners too. If you haven't seen these banners in use at trade shows or shopping malls lately, you just haven't been looking. These banners are inkjet-printed on lightweight fabric, using special waterproof ink so they stand up to weather for a month or so.

The Japanese are quite wild for these banners, they are a fixture in every shopping center, almost every tall building is covered with banners, and they are cheap enough to produce that they change them every month (or even faster).

This sort of banner was impractical before the invention of modern wide-format inkjet printers with roll-fed media, which for the first time allowed printing of banners of almost infinite length. Those banners appear to be 4 or 5 stories tall. Look at the red banners on the frontmost corner building. For example, here is a photograph of a Tokyo building with vertical banners:

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