[reportlab-users] Re: how to print label size

Henning von Bargen reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Sat, 13 Mar 2004 11:56:37 +0100


The company I'm working for has some experience with label printing under
windows.
Label printers are special in several ways:
- Some of them don't have a windows printer driver at all
and expect you to write data in a special printer language
that is not compatible to the usual way of printing in windows.
- Some have a windows printer driver for windows but the driver
just converts the whole page to a bitmap and sends that to the printer,
which can be slow if the printer is connected via a serial port.
- Many of the windows printer drivers are buggy.

When the PDF looks ok in Acrobat Reader and just printing is the problem,
it could be that the printer driver is buggy.

However, this reminds of one problem I had with a normal A4 RL-generated
report.
I couldn't print using a HP PostScript driver (no output on the printer
although data arrives)
but could print with no problems using a HP PCL driver. A strange behaviour,
since
most of the time the HP PostScript drivers work much better with Oracle
Reports
than the HP PCL drivers.

BTW you didn't tell anything about your environment (OS etc).
Printing is very OS specific.

> From: kbonasia@mclink.net
> Organization: linuxteam
> To: "Reportlab" <reportlab-users@reportlab.com>
> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:46:41 +0100
> Subject: [reportlab-users] how to print label size
> Reply-To: reportlab-users@reportlab.com
>
> I'm using ReportLab to try print some information from a Zope application
to a
> label (size 4cm x 2cm). I see in the python file pagesizes.py there are
some
> ISO format declared, as A4, A3...
> When I try to declare a new format, as LABEL1, with 4cm x 2cm (LxH)
dimensions
> I show a PDF with the right size but when I try to print it on a TEC
> B452Printer, a legacy printer for label, I don't obtain a good output.
> Can anyone has experience about this printer or suggest to change printer
(I
> can buy an Epson LX300 for example, and try with this...)
> thanks in advance.
> -- 
> Calogero Bonasia