Removing Perforations Off Fanfold Paper So It Looks Like Normal Typing Paper
| Field | Typing |
| Went Obsolete | |
| Made Obsolete By | Friction-feed printers (typically, inkjet and laser as opposed to dotmatrix and thermal-transfer). |
| Knowledge Assumed | The smallest smidgen of manual dexterity; extreme patience if enough pages were involved. |
| When useful | Any printing task using an old-enough printer |
Earlier printers would feed paper by using a spoked-wheel which aligned with holes on the left- and right-hand sides of a page. This was known as “tractor feed”, and is associated with obsolete printers such as thermal-transfer and dot-matrix types. In contrast, common modern printers use “friction feed”, whereby more-or-less normal paper is picked up by contact with a rubber surface typically a wheel.
As these were aesthetically horrible additions to a normal typing paper (and also due to a slight stigma against using an automatic computer to communicate, as opposed to a respectable typewriter), the holes themselves were on strips of paper, to be separated from the usable page by perforation. Note that the paper itself also came in one long strip with the pages separable by similar perforation (hence, fanfold). After a print job, the pages would need to be separated and the “wings” with the feedholes removed.
Apart from general dexterity, to optimize speed the typist would try to remove as many ply worth of holestrips before separating the pages, reducing the time required geometrically. However, this added difficulty would become significant at about 4 or 5-ply, though this varied with the paper. Maintaining a reasonable trade-off became more challenge with longer print jobs, as impatience grew.
The difficulty required to separate the hole-strips, as well as the pages, without ruining one's print job or at least making it look a mess, was a deciding factor in a user's perception of paper quality and was often associated with cost and other desirable paper characteristics.
(It is notable also that despite the nuisance of removing the perforations, tractor-feed is more reliable than friction-feed, and paper jams were not yet a common difficulty, although slippage did sometimes occur.)
It would be surprising if specialized industrial printers such as plotters did not use tractor feed for its precision and increased reliability.
As an aside, one could take two separated hole-strips; lay one atop the other with the holes at one end of each strip atop one another; rotate the strips so that they are perpendicular; and finally fold one over the other, alternatingly, to fashion a crude geegaw similar to a spring. This “skill” was prevalent at least in elementary schools with computer labs; I assume that it was also used to procrastinate in a work environment at least once.
