The transition from letterpress to digital printing provides the opportunity for a more effective way to communicate information on postal items. Current Postmarks include information such as postage value, date of posting and equipment identification, but this information is not readily machine readable. The emergence of digital printing and image processing technologies offers the opportunity to encode critical data in a form which is more suitable for computer data capture. However, the adoption of these technologies requires careful study, both to maximise the benefits from their introduction and because digital printing technology may bring with it the