There have been a few questions on SO about emulating a ZPL printers etc, but all of them require some native application or a an app.
(see here: Emulate ZPL printer )
My Question:
Is it possible to emulate the EPL2 printer language to render a .png on a unix machine via code?
You'd have to code an app to do it. As far as I know, Zebra hasn't released the fonts built into the printer though, so it would be very tedious...
Related
I have 2 Toshiba B-EP2DL barcode printers and one is showing Z-Mode so have to use Zebra compatible drivers to print. I prefer to use the TPCL drivers but cannot find any mention on how to turn off the Zebra emulation. Can anyone assist?
For a research project about printing nanofluids with an Piezo electric printer I want to see the the code that the computer sends to the printer. I am running Ubuntu 16.04 and have an Epson Stylus SX600FW printer.
Using Ghostscript 9.18 I want to print a simple ps file and obtain the output file that is being send to the printer. This file should contain some ESC/P sequences if I am right. Now I have some problems with the rigth driver is Ghostscript.
I want to print the file using : gs -sDEVICE=epson -sOutputFile=%pipe%lpr test.ps. The printer starts the print gibberish. Just some letters and symbols on page, not the two words that are in my test.ps.
So probably ghostscript doesn't use the rigth driver. How can I get gs to use the escp2-of-sx600fw or Epson-Stylus_Office_SX600FW driver, as stated on the gutenprint site?
Kind Regards Rick
If you want to use a non-standard device, then you will have to rebuild Ghostscript and tell it to include the device's source in the build.
Nobody has supplied us with source to an Epson SX600FW device, so we don't supply it, not even in the contrib directory. There is a 'vector' Espon device in there, but its not built in as standard.
Looks like Gutenprint itself drives the printer. Presumably it only uses Ghostscript to render PostScript and PDF files into some intermediate format that it can then convert onwards to the specified device format. If I'm right, then you can't make Ghostscript use the Gutenprint device driver, as that will be specific to GutenPrint. You'll have to use Gutenprint to do that.
This might sound like a very foolish question but I've been reading around and haven't been able to understand the lifecycle of a print job.
Program → PostScript → GhostScript → ? → Printer
My doubt is, what ( if any ) comes in the place of ? ?
To be honest, in general Ghostscript isn't in that loop at all, though it depends very much on your printer and operating system.
In general you would send PostScript directly to the printer, which would have a PostScript interpreter built in. If you don't have a PostScript printer, then you would (normally) produce some other page description language (eg HP PCL) and send that to the printer.
However (expanding slightly on what george said above) on Unix systems you may be using CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), which does use Ghostscript to render PostScript to a raster format (CUPS raster) for non-PostScript printers. The CUPS printer drivers repackage the raster into a form suitable for the specific printer.
Note that modern versions of CUPS use PDF as an intermediate format and so Ghostscript may be involved twice, once to create a PDF from the PostScript, and once to render a PDF to raster (or indeed, to convert it back to PostScript.....)
Also, there is the gsprint application, which works on Windows, it uses Ghostscript to render a bitmap which is written to a printer canvas and then using GDI calls printed to the printer using the Windows printer driver.
If you want to go the ghostscript route, the question mark would be filled in with "gsprint" which is part of the "gsview" package.
gsview allows postscipt files to be viewed with ghostscipt, where gsprint allows postscript files to be sent to a printer with ghostscript.
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/index.htm
Then to create a windows printer to be able to send the postscript output to, which would then run gsprint and output to a printer, you need "redmon".
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/index.htm
Your OS printer driver would fit in that spot. It receives the rendered output from ghostscript and converts it to a printer-specific format.
When connected, my Zebra printer the S4M is recognised by Windows with the "ZDesigner S4M-203dpi ZPL" driver and I'd like to use the EPL Driver "ZDesigner S4M-203dpi EPL".
I tried to install it manually, delete the ZPL driver, use the Zebra utility setup, upgrade the firmware to the last version but I didn't find the switch option.
I found one answer : http://www.fixya.com/support/t1950296-zebra_sm4_label_printer_change_zpl_epl
You will need to change the firmware on this printer in order to be able to change the language. I don't believe this printer will allow you to change the language using the advanced options in the menu unless they have recently changed this.
I found also a web page which proposed to download old driver for the S4M but I prefer to avoid it. http://www.jamfrance.com/site/support/download.asp?categorie=13
Note : To verify if the EPL driver was working, I used a custom application which send EPL data and I tryied to use Zebra firmware downloader which have 2 interesting options : Send EPL page and Send ZPL Page. You probably guessed, only the ZPL page works.
well i found the solution : https://km.zebra.com/kb/index?page=answeropen&type=open&searchid=1324718583535&answerid=16777216&iqaction=5&url=https%3A%2F%2Fkm.zebra.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3Fpage%3Dcontent%26id%3DSO8156%26actp%3Dsearch%26viewlocale%3Den_US&highlightinfo=6292684,73,91#
The EPL firmware is listed in the Special Firmware section on Zebra.com.
I have to install the special firmware of the S4M and it works .. it's sad that they don't explain the "Special" term (and in the release note also)
We're going to be building some J2ME apps and Java/Rails webapps which will have a Kannada(a south indian language, for those who don't know much about India) UI. The UI and the data will both be in Kannada for these apps.
So, we will need to write code containing some of these language text in the source code. I find it irritating that neither emacs nor XEmacs OR Jedit can edit any of these languages :-(
Someone mentioned that a variant of Emacs can do it except I don't know if it works on Windows and where to get hold of it.
I know notepad can do the trick BUT it's not a programmer's editor.
P.S : I am an EMacs guy but will be open to using other programmer editors.
P.P.S : This should work on Windows Vista/Windows 7. I wouldn't mind using VirtualBox or VMWare to boot into Linux to use an Linux Editor, if that is the only option I have!
So, we will need to write code containing some of these language text in the source code.
I think any Windows editor that supports UTF-8 will be able to do this. There should be plenty to choose from.
I'm the as the author of the Zeus editor and just recently UTF-8 support was added so I would expect Zeus should be able to do exactly this. But if it doesn't feel free to report a bug on the Zeus forum.
P.S : I am an EMacs guy but open to using other programmer editors in this situation.
Zeus has a Emacs keyboard emulation mode ;)
Considering it's Java you're using: Have you tried Eclipse? I know it's not an editor and might be a little overkill when one is used to Emacs, but it uses SWT which in turn uses the OS's native font rendering. And at least my browser shows that the Uniscribe can display Kannada just fine.
Another option might be Notepad++.