>>> I have a Brother QL-570 label printer printing on 29x90mm labels. My >>> goal is to have 6 characters printed across the center of the label. >>> It prints like this: >>> >>> $ echo 123456 | lpr >>> >>> but the text is in the upper corner of the label, it has the wrong >>> orientation, and the font is too small. >>> >>> It also prints like this: >>> >>> $ lpr test.png >>> >>> but the text doesn't come out very crisp, and I'd rather not create a >>> file with imagemagick for each label to print. Is there another way >>> to print large, properly oriented text on the fly? > > With some printers it's possible to add control codes to the text you're > printing to do stuff like this. > > EG: > http://www.sturec.com/help/printing/printers.htm > http://printers.necsam.com/public/printers/pclcodes/pcl5hp.htm
Yeah, that's the type of thing I'd like to do. > But it depends whether your printer driver supports them, and I very much > doubt any of the above will work for you. In some printers that sort of > stuff is implemented in hardware (firmware), but yours appears to be a > winprinter. I would look at the .ppd files first, to try & see if the author > has implemented anything like this. As you guessed, I just looked in the PPD but I don't see anything like that. The driver's page says: "It consists of a raster-to-printerdata filter, and XML data files for the foomatic database." I think that means this thing is basically a raster printer? > I really understand where you're coming from not wanting to mess with > imagemagick, but at the end of the day *something* has to raster the ASCII > into little pixels, so it's not really that dirty & shameful if you have to > write a little wrapper script to do so. On my trusty olde HP LaserJet 4000 > it may be the onboard hardware PostScript™ which converts the text into > character shapes, but your little printer doesn't have so much processing > power, so the computer has to do the rendering for it. > > Thus a wrapper script that calls imagemagick and converts $1 into an image > file may merely be considered a "userspace driver". If you make the image > larger, is this reflected on the printer's output, or does it perhaps get > sharper? Is it possible to change the DPI of imagemagick's output? If you > run lpr on images of other formats, do they print? You may find a different > file format might be sharper, or you might find that postscript files work > (handled by CUP's built-in software renderer) and that you can use > Ghostscript or something to manipulate the output. Ah, postscript works! > I assume you've read all of this guy's pages: > http://etc.nkadesign.com/Printers/QL550LabelPrinterPerl > http://etc.nkadesign.com/Printers/QL550LabelPrinter Yep. >> It is not very well supported under Linux: >> http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-QL-570 > > Have you found these pages useful in the past? My experience is that hardly > anyone ever bothers to update such pages. :( > > I'm not saying it's exactly a wonderprinter, famed in fable & song, but the > only thing I find helpful on there is the link to a page which links to the > etc.nkadesign.com pages. From the looks of those one should be able be able > to do something fairly useful with this printer, depending upon one's mad > skillz. I've got a QL-550 also anyway. I should have gotten a Zebra 2824 though so I could just use EPL2. Thanks a lot for the info and I'll get to work on a postscript script. - Grant
