A large portion of states contract their driver's license printing equipment (on a maintenance & operation basis) to the same company, which I believe used to be a division of Polaroid but has been bought and sold since then. So many of the norms that this article mentions are specific to that equipment and to many US states, but not to all of them. There are still some states that use relatively commodity (uncontrolled) plastic stock and transfer or sublimation printers, that you can get on eBay used for under a thousand. You can imagine that results in more counterfeiting which encourages states to switch to the more expensive and controlled equipment and stock.
Raised print is particularly variable, a lot of states don't use raised print. As I understand it, it's done by a specific machine that is especially costly (the rest of the laser features mostly come already done from the stock manufacturer).
Edit: it's L-1 Identity Solutions. I believe the ID card printing component used to be with Identix before they merged with a newer company to form L-1.
My DC license from ~2012 was just 2 decals stuck to a white plastic card. No raised lettering. The front decal started to peel back after a few years. It sure looked like a fake ID.
This kind of leads into the thing I was wondering about when reading the article: What about false positives? What are the consequences of denying entry to someone who did, in fact, have a real ID? Could they potentially sue the bar?
Raised print is particularly variable, a lot of states don't use raised print. As I understand it, it's done by a specific machine that is especially costly (the rest of the laser features mostly come already done from the stock manufacturer).
Edit: it's L-1 Identity Solutions. I believe the ID card printing component used to be with Identix before they merged with a newer company to form L-1.