Carbonless Paper for Commercial Printers:
Making the Magic Happen

If you’re wondering how carbonless paper works, don’t worry. Most of us at the Randolph office have wondered the same (I’m personally still going with ‘magic’ as a working explanation). We won’t go into the scientific explanation of the reactions in the paper here, because the most important thing to understand is that carbonless paper makes copies using pressure. As soon as your pen pushes down on the page, the process begins.

However, you can’t just put two sheets of carbonless together in any which way. The sheets have special coatings which let the magic happen, and they have to be stacked in the right order.

Let’s look at a simple two-part form. You want to write on the top sheet and have it copy onto the bottom sheet. The top sheet has a coating on its back, so it’s called CB, for “coated back.” The bottom sheet has the coating on its front, so it’s called CF, for “coated front.” When you press on the top sheet, the coated back reacts with the bottom sheet’s coated front, and your writing gets transferred.

If you want more copies, you can add sheets in the middle called CFB, for “coated front and back.” Each one has a coating on the front to receive a copy and a coating on the back to make another copy on the sheet below. You still use CB on top and CF below.