Lots of great information here which I will look into. 1. The jobs are not in currently PDL format. We'd like to keep things simple to start with and just print a JPG or PDF.
2. The printer will be attached locally via USB, although there are some networked and LPT printers out there too. To start with, USB printing is our first goal. 3. I have not looked at CUPS, but will look into it. Finding out possible solutions is exactly why I posted here. Just to clarify, I will be printing to various plastic ID card printers. I'd like to simply generate a JPG or PDF file on the server, transfer it to the client, and somehow send it to the printer. We know how to do all of this except sending to printer. Here is the first printer we want to support: Windows Print Driver http://www.zebra.com/us/en/support-downloads/card/zxp-series-3.html Windows SDK http://www.zebra.com/cardpartner/zmotif.php However, there are many other brands and models we wish to support, and eventually we'd like to be able to encode mag stripes, RFID, laminate, fold paper, stuff envelopes, etc. So learning how to create PDL jobs will probably be necessary. Thanks again for the help and ideas, Tauren On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Jeroen Janssen <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi, > > Printing (on any platform) to a printer basically consists of 2 steps. > > 1) generate PDL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ > Page_description_language) > > On Windows for example this could be done by a printerdriver that > translates > GDI calls into postscript. The important thing to note here is that > the printerdriver > knows how to deal with finishing options (like stapling, booklet, > trimming). If you > generate PDL data without the 'official' printerdriver then a > customer might not > be able to use these finishing options. > > If finishing options is not relevant to you then you might be able > to use a > generic printerdriver (i.e. PDFCreator is a generic printerdriver > on Windows that > generates PDF files). > > Note that on Windows there are generic printer drivers available > that can be > customized by printer manufacturers (i.e. this does the heavy > lifting from GDI to > postscript or pcl). For more information on that, see also: > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff560843(v=vs.85) > > 2) transfer PDL data to printer > > This highly depends on the printer type, but typical transport > 'mechanisms' are LPR/LPD, > Socket Printing, USB and (ofcourse) LPT. > > The OS has support for these transport mechanisms (on Windows this > is called 'printer port' > and there is a "Standard TCP/IP Port" available that can print to > network based printers). > > > So looking at all this, I have a couple of questions: > > 1) Are the jobs that you receive already in "PDL" format? > > 2) How is the attached printer actually attached? (i.e. network based > or USB) > > 3) (as already mentioned somewhere else in this thread) > Have you looked at CUPS? > > Best regards, > > Jeroen Janssen > > On May 18, 5:51 am, Tauren Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'd like to build a print server that receives jobs over the network and > > can print them to an attached printer. We were thinking about utilizing > > websockets to notify the print server that a job is ready, so node came > to > > mind. But it doesn't seem like node is the right tool for interfacing > with > > a printer. If anyone has ideas on how to do this, I'd love to hear them. > > > > I've been looking at projects such as node-qt and node-gui, but they > don't > > seem to support any printing features yet. > > > > Although we prefer to use linux or OSX for everything, these print > servers > > would be installed onsite at client locations. Besides the specific > > printers we need to print to only have Windows drivers at this time, so > we > > will definitely need this to run on Windows platforms. > > > > Thanks for your thoughts. > > > > Tauren > > -- > Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ > Posting guidelines: > https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "nodejs" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en > -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
