chute to provide conductive contact with a print cartridge interconnect 82 without causing any interference with the key coded projections 70 72 the invention is applicable to single chute carriages fig1 as well as carriages having additional chutes for holding other identical print cartridges and well as other different types of print cartridges traditional carriages holding four print cartridges and high performance carriages holding eight twelve and more print cartridges can also incorporate the benefits of the invention a presently preferred embodiment for multiple print cartridges is shown in fig2 with a first tri compartment print cartridge 60 holding cyan magenta and yellow ink mounted in chute 61 alongside a black ink print cartridge 60 a with similar external size specifications mounted in chute 61 a the key coded projections on print cartridge 60 are different from the key coded projections on print cartridge 60 a to prevent using the print cartridges in the wrong chutes the print cartridge 60 includes left and right flex ribbon circuits 86 88 and encoder flex 90 while print cartridge 60 a includes similar flex components 86 a 88 a and 90 a for providing communication through end terminals 92 94 92 a 94 a which are attachable to a printed circuit board not shown on the printer one implementation of the key coded projections on a print cartridge is shown in fig3 a 4 and 5 which show a five column two row matrix.