Citizen Printer

Could inkjet printers write data for archiving to be read by scanners?

Scanners can read a printed surface to several hundreds of dots per inch resolution. Inkjet printers can print dots in four colours to a similar accuracy. Would it be possible to use the four colours as a coding mechanism for storing information on good quality coated papers, which could be formulated to last for millenia? Many tens of megabytes of data would fit onto an A4 sheet, which would look grey, being covered by dots in the four printing colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These colours could represent zero, one, two, three, which is the basis of a quaternary numbering system. All that is needed are programs to turn data into an inkjet pattern and to read them back into a computer from a scanner. We would not have to fear losing our data to volatile memory in magnetic and optical media, and the carrier material being paper would last longer than the plastics used to make CDs and DVDs.

Public Comments

Of course, this is possible. It's nothing so different from a barcode, except that we are talking much smaller units. However, you would have to put strong error correction in there. Paper tends to crinkle quite fast and will turn yellow throughout the years, both of which strongly impacts your code. To add another point, most printers already do something comparable to that: They add a fingerprint, stating in very tiny dots the printer make, timestamp, etc. In any case, this would be an interesting project.
A good ink-jet print out is good enough for any decent scanner to convert into an image file and then read through any OCR (Optical Recognition programe). For Doing OCR - it is preferable not to have the document in color, as during conversion to B/W Yellows and Cyans will become light gray colors, which the software might have problems in recognising What you are suggesting has not been done so far. Why not send your proposal to one of the scanner and software manufacturers to do proper R&D on the subject. And if you already have something ready, offer to sell it to them and become a milionaire