Re: Printing in Java -- JAVA400-L

Hi Rick,

There are two different issues here: (1) printing from Java and (2)printing to a thermal printer.

Printing from Java is relatively easy; the standard Java librariesinclude reasonably good printing APIs for obtaining a printer,creating pages, and using graphics primitives to populate the pageswith text and/or graphics. This works great when printing to today'stypical output devices (laser printers, etc.). It doesn't work sowell for printing to line printers (dot matrix or whatever), and whenI've had to do that in the past I've gone a bit lower level and justsent a text stream directly to the printer port, an approach whichhas plenty of its own issues and for which someone else may have abetter solution.

With thermal printers (at least in the warehouse/shippingenvironments that I've worked with them in) the challenge is thateach one has it's own printer control language to define the labeland send data to the printer. It's really a lot like printing to aline printer, except instead of printing lines of text you'reprinting control instructions. Some thermal printers come withwindows printer drivers that allow you to treat them as a regularwindows printer (and there are third-party drivers available also)and while that would allow you to use the normal Java printing APIsbut it would also mean that each label would be sent to the thermalprinter as a bitmap, which tends to be grossly inefficient comparedto sending raw control instructions.

If I had to do this, my approach would actually be to use a labelprinting tool (my choice would be Seagull Scientific's BarTender) todrive the actual label printing. The way that would work is you'ddefine the label layout using their GUI interface, and then from yourJava code you'd either create a CSV data file or populate some DB2tables which the label design is tied to, and let BarTender worryabout the details of sending that to the printer. You can get anunlimited-user three-printer Enterprise license of BarTender forunder $800, which is I suspect is much less than the cost of going italone. The main downside of this is that BarTender is Windows only(but the printer can be connected via the network).

Alternately you could just use the regular Java printing system witha Windows driver, or you could hit the books and learn the controllanguage for your printer and control the printer directly. Manycurrent thermal printers actually have a direct network interface, sodepending on the model you might be able to avoid issues of having tosend data directly to a serial or parallel port.


Hope some of this rambling helps!

(Oh also, just in terms of general printing, there are lots oflibraries both free and commercial to help you do printing/reportingfrom Java. I haven't used one is several years as I do all myreporting to PDF via iText, but if it wasn't for the thermal printerrequirement here I'd recommend looking around for one of those, too.)


t.

On 1-Feb-07, at 9:07 AM, Rick DuVall wrote:

Hi Group,

    I have written several swing apps (desktop client ->
iSeries-i5-whatever), but have never used java to print anything.I nowhave a need to produce print-out on a little thermal printer aspart of thenew app I'm working on. Can anybody point me in the rightdirection? WhatI've found so far seems a bit convoluted. ;) Of course much ofjava has
struck me that way... <smile>
I continue to dig, but pointers are always welcome. Thanks inadvance!
Regards,

Rick DuVall
Systems Manager
Dealer's Auto Auction of Okc, Inc.
 <mailto:rick@xxxxxxxxxx> rick@xxxxxxxxxx
(405) 947-2886
 <http://www.nothingisreal.com/dfki/no-word>
http://www.nothingisreal.com/dfki/no-word

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