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ID Card Printing Under Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the laminated-plastic-slides dept.

peng1can asks: "I'm searching for a way to print ID cards in a an LDAP and preferably open source environment. We use LDAP heavily, and ideally we want to be able to pull user information and photos from LDAP and print onto ID Cards. Thus far, I've come up against two roadblocks: 1) Trying to make the ID station work under linux would be great, especially if I can script gphoto. But, I can't find an ID-card printer that doesn't supply windows-only drivers. The closest thing I can find is that Eltron provides a programming manual for their printers, but I have no knowledge of how to write a CUPS/LPRng printer driver. 2) If we had to resort to a Win-based workstation, I can find no method for accessing LDAP in a way that would work with an ID card system without spending thousands of dollars per station on an LDAP/ODBC gateway. I could try to write something in PERL for Win32, but can't find a way to control a digital camera that way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

3 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Try old DataCard printers by crazeded · · Score: 3, Informative
    I know (from experience) that the old DataCard printers (ImageCard I/II+/III series) use PostScript. The drivers are, of course, Windows-only... but I suspect with a little work they could be made to work with ghostscript or something like that. Really out of my league though, printing is never something I've tried under Linux.

    If you do go looking for DataCard printers, the best source is to scan eBay periodically -- the dealers which specialize in older printers will charge an arm, leg, and probably a few other things as well. Stay far away from them, and stick to auctions and such.

    Hope this helps you out!

  2. PPD files by larien · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you have a windows driver with a PPD file, drop that into /usr/share/cups/model and restart cups. You can use that as a driver.

  3. Re:Laminate by Can · · Score: 2, Informative

    Guess I should have said that we're doing 1000+ cards per year, and we need to be able to add magstripes to the cards. So, lamination won't really work. :-(

    Thanks for the suggestion, though.