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Linux-Friendly Label Printer Recomendations?
pdkl95 writes "I have been using some small, simple desktop label printers for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it's rapidly becoming clear that my printing needs are for something far more 'industrial strength.' Several of the label printers have failed, and they never really had the management features I wanted. So, does anybody have recommendations on label printers, that can hold up to a quite heavy load? The catch is that I'm printing to them from CUPS under Linux, and it seems like specialty-printers are a windows-centric field."
I understand that this may not be actually answering your question, but, if you have *any* Windows systems in your office running XP Professional or Vista Business/Enterprise, you might try getting a label printer for one of those. These OSes come with IIS, and you can easily write a .NET web service that you can then access via PHP from your Linux machine and print labels that way. Yes, a hacky solution indeed, but it works if you can't find any compatible printers for Linux.
It sucks that manufacturers don't really make printer drivers for a lot of high-end equipment for Linux, but I suppose that's the nature of things, when the vast majority of people who would need them tend to only use Windows or OS X.
Try Sato America.
http://www.satoamerica.com/
They are industrial oriented. You can get all sorts of solutions, of which the most universal would be serial based. You can connect those up to almost anything with a serial port, fill it up with large rolls of labels and drive it all in your own code if you want to.
Yes, I know, their own software is Windows based. Don't let that be the stumbling block.
Two jobs ago I worked at a luxury goods manufacturer and we printed items tags on a SATO serial printer off of our main frame. Its just a matter of sending the right control codes over the serial port.
It would be helpful if you posted more information about what you're trying to print labels for and what size/shape/environmental requirements there are for the labels.
I can give you an example of what I have done for labels in the past though. I had a requirement to create thousands of labels for our inventory system. The only requirement was they had to be barcode readable and printed on small labels so we could tag our network equipment with them. The solution I came up with about 4 years ago (and is still in use today) was to use Avery 8167 (I believe) labels which are 1.75"x.5". I created the first sheet by hand using MS word since that's what the template I had access to was for. I used the "Free 3 of 9" font which is available for free on the web and put something like "*10001*10001" in each cell, incrementing by one each time. The font interprets the number surrounded by asteriks as a barcode and prints the same thing again in clear text. I then adjusted the font settings to the appropriate sizes and saved it. I then wrote a perl script that would parse the binary word document and change the numbers in each cell. It started with the number I fed it on the command line and ran through to the end.
Since our equipment is reasonably hands off, this system works well. We had tried doing this with a dedicated label printer before I started there and no one could reliably get the printer to work. It's a good solution since you can easily print off labels quickly from any machine since any laser printer can be printed to. It would probably be even easier to implement in openoffice since the document would be saved in XML and would be easier to parse.
Installing a driver is, quite often, "a problem".
Absolutely. We've still got hardware that comes with a Windows driver disk with a day-glo sticker on it saying "install me first" and a piece of hardware with a little cap on its USB port secured by another day-glo sticker telling you to find that CD before plugging in the device. Case in point, I got two identical web cams, one for my Mom, one for me. She thought it'd be nice if she could see her granddaughter in-between my occasional trips upstairs^B^B^B^B^B^B^B^Bback home. Mine plugs into Ubuntu machine and works out of the box. Hers requires a call to the neighborhood computer guy to insert the disk, run the setup, and get the hardware installed configured. Kinda backwards, seeing as Windows is for average people and Linux is for geeks, right?
And let's not forget that with windows driver installs, you have to make sure not to click (or forget to unclick) the various crapware that comes with the driver. Because sometimes that crapware does more than just waste some disk space and poop out stupid icons on the desktop.
But back to the overall topic. One could do worse than to visit Amazon or Newegg or another retailer that has detailed user reviews and check out printers (or other hardware) to find out if anyone else has had good results with Linux. Alternatively, perhaps a stand-alone label printer with its own keyboard and LCD would also work -- some are pretty sophisticated in terms of fonts available, barcodes and file storage.
I am not a crackpot.