jolly
VIP Member
Hi All,
I'm talking SATO, Zebra and the like printers, that receive a label format as a plain text markup package... not talking about using a custom font to render a barcode on a PDF document.
The problem with BIP is that the output options are not usable - these printers cannot accept PDF or Excel formats.
There is an eText output option, but again, not very useful as (I believe) it won't cater to non-printing characters required in SATO markups and it won't cater to multi line outputs in a convenient fashion. The template is also quite obscure to look at maintain.
All quite frustrating as it's quite easy to get the data generated in the UBE and therefore in the XML, and an RTF template markup (minus non printable characters) is also easy to create, so the resulting PDF looks exactly as we need in a simple TXT format.
In the documentation I see vague references to using XSL transformations to output to txt but can't find any hard evidence that this will be useful for this applicaiton.
I am starting to think that the approach could be to just have BIP output to a simple PDF and then write something custom (wanted to avoid this) to pinch the PDF file from the BIP repository, and do a PDF->TXT conversion before chucking it to the printer. Zebra ZPL runs on printable ASCII only but SATO use EXC, STX, ETX etc so would also need a post process to convert some sort of escape notation into the actual ASCII characters.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'm looking at you, Justin and Daniel!
Cheers
JohnO
I'm talking SATO, Zebra and the like printers, that receive a label format as a plain text markup package... not talking about using a custom font to render a barcode on a PDF document.
The problem with BIP is that the output options are not usable - these printers cannot accept PDF or Excel formats.
There is an eText output option, but again, not very useful as (I believe) it won't cater to non-printing characters required in SATO markups and it won't cater to multi line outputs in a convenient fashion. The template is also quite obscure to look at maintain.
All quite frustrating as it's quite easy to get the data generated in the UBE and therefore in the XML, and an RTF template markup (minus non printable characters) is also easy to create, so the resulting PDF looks exactly as we need in a simple TXT format.
In the documentation I see vague references to using XSL transformations to output to txt but can't find any hard evidence that this will be useful for this applicaiton.
I am starting to think that the approach could be to just have BIP output to a simple PDF and then write something custom (wanted to avoid this) to pinch the PDF file from the BIP repository, and do a PDF->TXT conversion before chucking it to the printer. Zebra ZPL runs on printable ASCII only but SATO use EXC, STX, ETX etc so would also need a post process to convert some sort of escape notation into the actual ASCII characters.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'm looking at you, Justin and Daniel!
Cheers
JohnO