I have a piece of equipment from the late 1980s. It outputs text and graphics directly to dot matrix and Laserjet III printers. These are starting to be harder to find. I would like to implement a solution which allows me to connect to the computer and "print" to it (a piece of software) then print it to a modern printer or .pdf file. I can't locate the piece of software that would accept the input of the device and emulate an old printer. Any solutions??? Thanks for any help. I know this isn't exactly what most of you do, but I'm hoping someone has had need of something similar in their experience.
It already exists. It's called PrintCapture and sells for US$97.00. You will need the necessary interface hardware as well, depending on which type of printer port the device has; they list some of those devices on their web site under the "Details" section.
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I have written a printing application that works well. I can write files, update settings and do most all functionality from one console. But one aspect of the program has eluded me for quite a while: the ability to read the Zebra register/configuration values.
It would be good to periodically be able to read the values on the Zebra and compare them to default known good standards and to be able to reset them if necessary.
Currently, in order to see these values, I need to either use the built-in web page (networked printers only), print a report, or scroll through the printer interface. What I really need to is a method to be able to read these registers values and create a known good setup file.
Has anyone been able to find any SDK or trick to read these values using .NET (C# or vb.Net)?
The application is a windows desktop utility used on my shop floor and I communicate with the printers using either LPT and ethernet interfaces (as applicable).
I would recommend checking out the Zebra Link-OS SDK which has a lot of functionality when it comes to what you can do with Zebra printers. Specifically they have a section titled "Getting all printer settings and their configuration". However the code example they provide will not work unless your printer is a Link-OS enabled printer. If that happens to be the case then great! If not you can use the SGD class within the Zebra.SDK.Printer namespace to use Set-Get-Do commands to retrieve and change information. More information on SGD can be found in this ZPL manual under the SGD Printer Commands section.
I bough a cheap RFID reader from eBay, just to play about with. There is no API, it just writes to stdin - that it to say, if you have Notepad open and tap an RFID tag to the reader its Id number appears in the Notepad window.
I am looking around for a reasonably priced reader/writer with an actual API (any recommendations?).
Until then I need to knock together a quick demo using what I have, just to prove the concept.
How can I best intercept the input from the USB connection? (and is there a free VCL control to do this?)
I guess if I just have a modal form with a control which is active then I can hook its on change event. But modal forms seem a bit rude. Maybe I can hook keyboard input, as it seems to be injecting like types chars?
Any idea? Please tell me if I cam not explaining this clearly enough.
Thanks in advance for your help.
In the end, I just hooked the keyboard, rather than trying to intercept the USB. It works if I check that my application is active and pass on the keystrokes otherwise. My app doesn't have any keyboard input, just mouse clicks (and what I read from RFID is digits only, so I can still handle things like Alt+F4. Maybe not the perfect solution for everyone, but all that I could get to work)
Based on your description, it sounds like the RFID reader is providing a USB HID keyboard interface.
I don't know if there is anything similar in delphi, but in libusb there is a libusb_claim_interface, which requests that the OS hand control over to your program.
A Delphi library for doing HID devices:
http://www.soft-gems.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=33
Is there anyone that could give some proper guideness in Printing Reports (e.g. XtraReports)
in Dot Matrix Printers? Or any information printing in Dot Matrix Printers. Can i just print the report as i could print in InkJet/Laser printers? Should i use Stream to LPT1, export the report as RTF and print as bytes[]? Use Escape Codes? Any info for the above targeting C# .NET? I should handle printing my business object for every property to a specific location? HOW?
If it were me (and 20 years ago it would have been) I'd concentrate on writing the document in GDI properly as a good, well-structured C# program. From there Windows can render it onscreen or to just about any printer you've got drivers for.
Let Windows worry about the print drivers for actually rendering the GDI document onto paper and handling system things like what port it's connected to (USB, Parallel, etc..) and all of the nasty protocol details.
Please don't wire things to "LPT1", "COM" ports or any of that crap. Your admins and future users of your software will hate you for it.
I'm building a new web-based product. The problem is that many clients have specific printers to print specific documents. Just think reports,barcodes,invoices etc. All on a special printer with the right paper etc...
Usually when printing from the web you cannot make the software choose a printer or change the settings. However it's just that that I want to do.
I want to print without a dialog. And enter the printer + settings with my software
The only solution I know of now is the commercial version of acrobat that has some javascript printing support..
Does anyone know of any other alternatives ?
Thanks in advance !
small-medium business
No heavy installion but common stuff is ok
ie. flash/silverlight/acrobat/whatever is possible
I generate what is necessary for printing (PDF/Tiff etc)
Who are your customers -- enterprises or SOHO? Are you generating PDFs? Or, raw tiffs? If you are generating PDFs there is something called a JDF file where you can specify the print settings to your heart's content. The flip side is the device needs to be capable of understanding JDFs. You can then attach the JDF with the PDF as a mime package. If you are generating tiffs, I think there isn't much need of printer settings except for the correct device profile(s) to be installed.
Because of security reasons, you cannot control that from within the browser.
If I where in your shoes, I'd create a small program for my clients to install, registering a specific file extension to this program and creating files in this format on the website, and have the program do the printing for me.
Your easy choices are either PDF or Microsoft's Reporting/Report Viewer
We are making a lab instrument using an ARM9/RTOS system. The client has asked about printing simple reports from the ARM9 system. In this case, we have USB Host support in the RTOS. I'm thinking about printing bitmaps in generic PCL, hoping that will cover the widest range of printers. Is there a better way to approach this? I'm assuming the RTOS does not have printer drivers, and I don't want to support a lot of printers.
We also support USB device mode on our system, so you could plug in a photo printer, and our device would appear to be a USB stick. So that would work, but it's a bit clunky. This will be a C/C++ embedded system
Pretending to be a digital camera and interfacing with a PictBridge printer actually sounds pretty clever. It would remove the need to deal with different printer drivers, and if my understanding of the technology is correct, you could even control the operation of the printer right from your device.
On the other hand, as someone who has used a fair number of computerized lab instruments (oscilloscopes etc.) I find the ability to save screenshots from an ethernet/web interface to be much more useful. Print is dead.
Have you looked at what all the scope vendors are doing? They all have print options (I think) and I don't know what they are doing to solve this problem.
Last time I was involved with something like this, we used serial ports to talk to HP printers using PCL. That backfired as everyone quickly stopped making serial printers!
PostScript is natively supported by most printers, so you could just send it over the wire, but it would be a lot more cumbersome than straight ASCII. There are libraries, but they're bulky.
Since your device can appear to be a USB stick, a simple solution would be to generate a report as a JPEG image and then have the printer open and print it. This way, the people who want paperless output can use the image as-is, and everyone else can print it.
If I understand you correctly, you could write a formatted text file and do a "print" command through Windows in the "usb stick" mode.
For a simple report, it would be best to stick to straight ASCII. If you need some graphics, PCL would be a good choice for B/W laser printers, but I'm not sure how universal it would be for the more common ink-jet printers.
Edit: the PCL Reference Manual is available as a PDF from HP.