On 1 Apr 2009, at 04:25, Joseph wrote:
On 03/31/09 19:40, Grant wrote:
I have a Brother QL-570 label printer printing on 29x90mm labels. My
goal is to have 6 characters printed across the center of the label.
It prints like this:
$ echo 123456 | lpr
but the text is in the upper corner of the label, it has the wrong
orientation, and the font is too small.
It also prints like this:
$ lpr test.png
but the text doesn't come out very crisp, and I'd rather not create a
file with imagemagick for each label to print. Is there another way
to print large, properly oriented text on the fly?
With some printers it's possible to add control codes to the text
you're printing to do stuff like this.
EG:
http://www.sturec.com/help/printing/printers.htm
http://printers.necsam.com/public/printers/pclcodes/pcl5hp.htm
But it depends whether your printer driver supports them, and I very
much doubt any of the above will work for you. In some printers that
sort of stuff is implemented in hardware (firmware), but yours appears
to be a winprinter. I would look at the .ppd files first, to try & see
if the author has implemented anything like this.
I really understand where you're coming from not wanting to mess with
imagemagick, but at the end of the day *something* has to raster the
ASCII into little pixels, so it's not really that dirty & shameful if
you have to write a little wrapper script to do so. On my trusty olde
HP LaserJet 4000 it may be the onboard hardware PostScript™ which
converts the text into character shapes, but your little printer
doesn't have so much processing power, so the computer has to do the
rendering for it.
Thus a wrapper script that calls imagemagick and converts $1 into an
image file may merely be considered a "userspace driver". If you make
the image larger, is this reflected on the printer's output, or does
it perhaps get sharper? Is it possible to change the DPI of
imagemagick's output? If you run lpr on images of other formats, do
they print? You may find a different file format might be sharper, or
you might find that postscript files work (handled by CUP's built-in
software renderer) and that you can use Ghostscript or something to
manipulate the output.
I assume you've read all of this guy's pages:
http://etc.nkadesign.com/Printers/QL550LabelPrinterPerl
http://etc.nkadesign.com/Printers/QL550LabelPrinter
It is not very well supported under Linux:
http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-QL-570
Have you found these pages useful in the past? My experience is that
hardly anyone ever bothers to update such pages. :(
I'm not saying it's exactly a wonderprinter, famed in fable & song,
but the only thing I find helpful on there is the link to a page which
links to the etc.nkadesign.com pages. From the looks of those one
should be able be able to do something fairly useful with this
printer, depending upon one's mad skillz.
Stroller.
