[aydwi]

Very interesting! I'm always amazed at kind of creative work I come across on here. Did not expect to read a success story about generating imagery for thermal printers this morning, but I'm glad I did.

Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?

[semireg]

Also worth noting they in my journey I’ve added the ability to submit the label jobs as PDFs to existing printer drivers. This allows for targeting full color label printers like epson and Primera, but also inkjet and laser printers that use sheets of labels. This is accomplished by rendering the labels on a larger page and then sending the resulting PDF to the system printer. There’s also the option of sending the images to a directory on the file system and naming the files using a column from the spreadsheet. Quite versatile … but difficult to market.

[semireg]

Yes, the app uses node-usb to read and write directly with printers matching vids/pids. Each vendor is a custom implementation with some similarity and lots of differences. It usually involves parsing status to get DPI, busy states, then sending raster image data, and other commands to place the image, feed speed, heat settings, cutter, etc.