Printing carbon forms with dot matrix okidata printer

Creating an app to fill out some government forms using PHP (cakephp). The forms have about 4 layers for all the necessary parties to get a carbon copy. Which is why a dot matrix printer is being used.

Here's an example form: Manifest Example: Designated Facility to Destination State (PDF) (1 pg, 93K)

Should I create a PDF based on the layout of the form and print? Or should I be trying to create a PNG or some sort of print CSS/HTML page? I've experimented with TCPDF, which is a PHP PDF class - but I'm worried I'm overcomplicating things - not to mention, it takes quite a while to line everything up correctly with this class. And, it seems like it could get cumbe开发者_StackOverflow社区rsome creating PDFs just to trash them after the form has been printed. We're printing about a 100 of these a day.

Chances are that this printer is Epson FX-80 command compatible. You should be able to generate a text file with the correct escape sequences, then raw dump it to the printer port. This is how we did things back in the day before Windows.