Printing to Barcode Printers

Dean_Axon

I am trying to write to a TEC B482 printer. Unfortunately the manual is very large and taking some getting through. Has anyone worked with one of these barcode printers before, and if so could you point me in the right direction as where to start, and what has been found to be the best solution.

Thanks in anticipation

jeremy.cooke@utaesl.com

Contact your printer supplier and ask them for the OCX/ActiveX object - one should be available for anything you purchase, we wouldn't buy the printer if one wasn't available.

JC

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mfabian

I don't know this specific printer (TEC B482) but generally there are two approaches on how to print barcodes. Some printers provide both methods:

1) The printer is shipped with a specific printerdriver which usually contains a TrueType Font (e.g.: TEC_CODE39). In your report you simply have to set the font-property of all Barcode-Fields to this font. Make sure to have this printer-driver installed on every client.

2) The printer is accessed as "Generic Text Only" or "Universal Text Only" printer which means that no Escape-sequences are generated from the driver; the data is sent raw.
Selecting Font, fontsize, kind of barcode etc. is then done by a number of printer-commands which have to be defined in the report and might look similar to this:

[Label=Start]

[PositionXY=120,50]
[Text=Hello World]
[Font=Barcode39,<options>]
[Text=1234567890]
[Label=End]

Needless to say that this report doesn't look very good in preview mode :-(
Besides, nothing can prevent you from studying the manual.

Marcus

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Marcus Fabian
m.fabian@thenet.ch
+41 79 439 78 72

brucem

This may be no help at all, but we are using a product called loftware LLM.Its a barcode designer / printer etc.

The product sits on an NT box and can talk to up to 12 printers at the same time. A 'watchdog' piece of software scans various directories for a text file which it interprets. This allows you to select different label layouts per customer / product etc etc and just dump one raw text file out...

There is a web site www.llm.com i believe

Bruce

SimonG

We have a customer using a TEC B472 printing Delivery labels with Barcodes and the approach is exactly as per Marcus's first point.

We downloaded a Windows driver from tecamerica.com and follow the links to the Thermal Printers Division.

I found it was easiest with Code 39 and as long as the font name in the fields properties matches the True Type font name exactly i.e 'BC C39 3 to 1 Narrow' then it works like a dream. Also ensure all the clients that are going to use the report/label have the True Type fonts installed.

Simon Godfrey