Printing to thermal printers

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chopper_pc
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Posts: 15
Joined: Fri May 30, 2008 10:55 pm

Printing to thermal printers

Post by chopper_pc »

I have developed a web based shipping program for a local freight forwarding company. I have been asked to add an option to have the bill of lading print out on a thermal 4x6 UPS style printer. Does anyone have experience with this? I'm wondering if I am best off to convert the bill to a pdf and take it from there. To be honest I don't even know where to start. Any pointers , recommendations, readings, places to start would be great.

Thx
nowaydown1
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Posts: 169
Joined: Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:22 am

Re: Printing to thermal printers

Post by nowaydown1 »

I've done a little bit of thermal printing stuff in the past. We toyed around with a few different options before finally deciding to just PDF the stuff and let the printer figure out the best way to work it. If I had to recommend a direction to you, that would be the one. PDF let us keep our options open for coming in behind and slamming 2D barcodes on stuff, etc. There's some pre-built PDF stuff there out there that are fairly flexible to work with.

I've used this one a few times:
http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/

I'm not a big fan of the wrapper class they provide, but the base class is understandable enough that if you need to write a custom wrapper for it that it shouldn't take too long. :)
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