In my experience, even when programming with control strings, you are limited to the printer resident fonts on a Datamax or other thermal printer, and there is no bolding of these fonts.
You can pick different fonts to achieve a similar effect, however. That would involve sending command strings to the printer, as THEMAL YES is too limited to support different fonts on the same line, (or printing in any direction except reverse portrait, or scaling bar codes). If you want to see what those look like, download a trial copy of "Bartender" from www.seagullscientific.com along with the printer driver for your Datamax, Citizen or Zebra printer and experiment with label design. You need to stick with the printer resident fonts (i.e. no true type fonts). In Magic, you can have some of your label done in the picture with "THERMAL YES" In C/S, you have to set the printer up as GENERIC in the UNIVERSE and change the print driver on the server to GENERIC/TEXT to be able to send control strings, and then you have to do all the formatting yourself. Joe Cocuzzo Vice President NPR Services Iatric Systems, Inc. Phone/Fax: (978) 805-4115 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.iatric.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Charlie Downs Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 5:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [MEDITECH-L] Pharmacy labels Below is an e-mail that I sent to Meditech. Does anyone have anything further to add? Also, is there a way to bold thermal labels on a Datamax I class printer? My analyst says that because of the way thermal works, you can't bold on any type of thermal printer. Is this true? Thanks, Charlie I am comparing our pharmacy labels to the recommendations for labels from the ISMP website and I noticed a couple of things that Meditech needs to do to meet their recommendations: 1. We need to be able to use lower case letters in both brand and generic drug names so that tall-man lettering can be used on labels, MARs, reports, etc.. Yes, one can use lower case letters, but then you can't do a look-up because of Meditech's reliance on using upper case letters. 2. Certain parts of labels (patient name, generic drug name, and specific dose) are recommended to be bolded. With thermal labels, you can't bold anything, you can only make the font larger, and this is an all or nothing thing for each line. For instance our label has the patient name and the medical record number on the same line. There is no way to have the name bolded and the MR number not bolded. However, we need to use thermal printers for barcoding. Are there label printers out there that can bold specific fields on a line and also print readable barcodes? Please check the site http://www.ismp.org/Tools/guidelines/default.asp where you can see their recommendations. Have you seen these recommendations? Is Meditech addressing this? Also, I would recommend that someone from Meditech keep an eye on the ISMP website so that Meditech can be at the forefront in adopting any ISMP recommendations as soon as they are published. Thanks, Charlie Charles Downs Pharm.D. Washington County Hospital Inpatient Pharmacy 251 E. Antietam Street Hagerstown, MD, 21740 301-790-8904 ***** CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE ***** This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= To subscribe or unsubscribe to the meditech-l, visit MTUsers.COM. To check the status of the meditech-l, visit MTUsers.NET. For help, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________ meditech-l mailing list [email protected] http://mtusers.com/mailman/listinfo/meditech-l =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= To subscribe or unsubscribe to the meditech-l, visit MTUsers.COM. To check the status of the meditech-l, visit MTUsers.NET. For help, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________ meditech-l mailing list [email protected] http://mtusers.com/mailman/listinfo/meditech-l
