ROC Formation™

Design Environment Manager and Printer Resource Control

ROC Formation is the premiere solution for creating electronic forms on any PC in minutes. Forms are uploaded to the HP e3000 and automatically merged with data for print production. ROC Formation easily turns valuable HP e3000 data into professional, customized forms.

ROC Formation's new design interface, Formation Design 2.0, makes creating, maintaining, and updating forms more intuitive than ever before. Administrators and designers seamlessly edit multiple forms using widely recognized design tools and an easy-to-use, Java-based interface. Formation Design 2.0 is backward compatible with forms created in previous versions of Formation Design. Forms are also automatically updated with new fonts that display more accurately on-screen while maintaining existing spacing and layouts for printing.

A menu-driven HP e3000 program, Formation Environment Manager allows definition of everything involved in a particular print job: forms, character fonts for data (including bar codes), characteristics of the physical and logical pages, form placement on the page, and form sequence. This information is compiled into a standard HP e3000 environment file as a string of PCL macros (HP's printer control language) that describes the specifications to the laser printers.

ROC Formation supports the printing of two-dimensional MaxiCode symbols used on package labels for high-speed sorting and processing.

A broad base of trade associations and technical specification groups have endorsed MaxiCode as a recognized standard for sorting and tracking packages, including the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Automatic Identification Manufacturers trade association (AIM).

There are two levels of information embedded in the MaxiCode symbol. The first level holds the transporting company's required fields, which include the postal code, country code, tracking number, service class, shipper I.D., and carrier code. The second level is customizable by the shipper and can contain data such as the purchase order number, customer number, and product code. MaxiCode saves both shippers and transportation providers money and provides more detailed tracking information.

Features	Benefits
New Formation Design 2.0 interface	Reduces the cost and complexity of forms administration
Customizable, professional forms merged with e3000 data	Lower cost than pre-printed forms and improved customer satisfaction
Support for printing two-dimensional MaxiCode symbols	Reduced shipping costs and enhanced shipment tracking for shippers and their customers

Compatibility
Runs on all supported versions and many older versions of HP MPE/iX.