I'm using SMB shared printers to print labels ( Zebra printer ) written in ZPL from IIS backend.
The printable item is in the Queue while i'm closing the connection but the printer do not print the data.
I've checked the System32\Spool\Printers and the SDL has data but SPL is empty.
There is no errors, the JobStream.Close(); the connection and the item is disappearing.
I've googled a lot and checked the similar questions but I did not find the answer.
Thank you!
I realise that this is quite an old post, but thought I would add this as I have been having similar problems printing to Zebra printers from C#.
It turned out that a way that I could work around this was to set the "Keep printed documents" checkbox in the advanced tab of the printer settings.
Not only was the printer then retaining the document, but it was also actually printing out the document, whereas previously the document was disappearing from the queue without printing.
I'm working on c#.net application that already use serial port to print ticket with text and a little image as logo by thermal printer.
Now i need to migrate the implementation to allow application to print through Parallel Port because the hardware is changed...
For serial port (COM1...COMN) i used ESC/POS command..
is it possible continue to use ESC/POS and redirect the print to parrallel?..
exist documentation?..
i found many doc to print text only .
what i have to do to print image?
thanks
.NET abstracts printing from the printer, so the code is the same regardless of whether the printer is serial, on the network, connected via parallel port, or connected via bluetooth. To print an image, you would use the DrawImage method of the Graphics object--more detail can be found on MSDN.
Whether the printer is on parallel port or serial port is a function of how the printer is defined in Windows, and is not important to .NET.
However, if you are resorting to sending raw escape sequences and bypassing the use of a printer driver (such as referenced by ESC/POS), then you are making a whole world of extra work for yourself, and you'll need to refer to the printer's technical documentation for how to do what you ask.
I've been working on a desktop application built using .NET Framework 4.5 and C# as language. Requirement is that a printer will be connected on serial port, port settings will be provided by user through the application like port number, baud rate etc. etc.
When user hits a print button, it should directly print to the printer without showing a print dialogue.
I've never done printing from desktop application and i've no idea how to achieve this.
Should i have to code specific to driver of that printer?
Or is there any generic way to send print instructions to printer connected to serial port?
I can send normal string to serial port, but what if i need to do some formatting like drawing a table, how can i make a serial port printer printing a formatted table and values inside it ... for example a bill.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Amit
You will want to send ESC/POS commands. This will control the font, line height, etc. as well as the actual text being transmitted.
http://pyramidacceptors.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ESC_POS_Protocol_Commands_REV_B.pdf
Another userful SO question: How to use esc/pos command with c#?
Also, no need to reinvent the wheel. Check Github for a library: https://github.com/yukimizake/ThermalDotNet
As far as generating tables and other such non-text, you'll want to read up on the command set supported by your target printer. If you're printing a bill, it sounds like you are targeting a thermal printer. Image/non-text support will vary from model to model.
I have a situation where the only way to generate a certain datafile is to print it manually to FILE: under Windows and save it in a file for further processing.
I would really like to have a small stand-alone program which embeds this binary printer driver so I can run it from a batch file and have it generate that binary file for me, as we can then fully automate the "save file in Visio, 'print' it and upload it to the final destination and trigger a remote test".
Is this possible with a suitable Windows SDK? I am a Java programmer, so I do not know Visual Studio and the possibilities with MSDN - yet! - but I'd appreciate pointers.
EDIT: I have the installation files for that printer driver, both 32 and 64 bit. Older versions may include a 16 bit driver.
EDIT: The "print to FILE:" functionality is just what was recommended by the documentation. I have played a little bit with using the LPR-protocol to see what it can do. I'd still prefer the "invoke small binary" approach.
The general problem which you formulate is difficult to solve. Mostly a printer driver consists from some well known components like Print Monitor, Print Processor etc. which are well documented in Windows Driver Kit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff560885%28v=VS.85%29.aspx. Some years ago I wrote a Print Monitor. It worked many years at a customer. So I know exactly what I writing about. A Print Monitor is nothing more as a DLL with well documented functions. The same is about most other printer components. Those DLLs will be loaded and called from Spooler. If you have a modern printer driver it has no components which run in kernel mode. So one can load most of DLLs from which consist every printer driver and call corresponding function.
You are interesting for using one concert printer driver. So the first what one should do is to examine how this driver is implemented. If you find out which component do the job which you need, you will be probably able to load this DLL in your process and produce output which you need. It is possible that you post an URL where I could download this driver?
UPDATED: I though a little more about your requirements. It seems to me you can goes with the way suggested by developer of the printer driver. If the driver can print to a local port FILE, then it can print in any printer port. So you can give src of a Port Monitor Server driver from C:\WinDDK\7600.16385.1\src\print\monitors\localmon (see also http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff556478%28v=VS.85%29.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff549405%28v=VS.85%29.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff563806%28v=VS.85%29.aspx). (I is a windows 32/64 DLL, not a real driver) and makes small modification. Instead of saving results to a file you can dispatch the results to your application. It will be work with 100% without any tricks. If you will have some problem to understand localmon I can give you some tips. It is really not complex. The main changes which you have to do is to modify LcmStartDocPort LcmWritePort LcmReadPort LcmEndDocPort functions from localmon.c. Some easy thing which is distinguish Port DLL from a typical DLL, that instead of exporting all DLL's functions it export only one InitializePrintMonitor2 with pointers to all other functions.
UPDATED 2: One more tip for usage of "Local Port" monitor. If goes in printer configuration, then choose "Add Port...", select "Local Port" and click "New Port..." you can type any file name like "C:\temp\my.bin". Then all what you print through a printer will be printed in this file without any user iteration. The name can be any win32 file name (UNC names or Named pipes are also allowed). With this way you can realize some scenarios without any programming with DDK.
UPDATED 3: I looked at the printer driver from different sides and looked one more time in the API in DDK. Now I want recommend you to choose the easiest way, and the way which will be full supported from the driver manufacturer. I suggest following:
You install a printer with the driver which you need and choose as the output port a Local Port with a fixed file name (see Update 2). I named here the destination filename as C:\TEMP\Output.afp. So you receive exactly the same situation like recommend you driver manufacturer. Fixed file name is absolutely the same as FILE: port. So if you print to the printer you receive in Output.afp file in the C:\TEMP directory. To be sure the end of writing you can use ReadDirectoryChangesW or FindNextChangeNotification / FindFirstChangeNotification functions with dwNotifyFilter equal to FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE. Then you receive notification after last write-time of the file. It means after the end of writing and after FileClose and after the cache is sufficiently flushed. So the file Output.afp is not locked and you can really safe read the results.
For printing of simple documents you can use WritePrinter function (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd162959%28VS.85%29.aspx and remark in the documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd145226%28VS.85%29.aspx). Writing of complex files with bitmaps, color and different fonts you have to use typical GDI API like one this in Windows (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd162865%28v=VS.85%29.aspx).
This solution looks not very spectacular like writing a printer driver component or a simulation of spooler environment for printer driver, but it will work, will safe work and will be full supported from the driver manufacturer.
(It's been 10 years since I did anything like this, but I don't think the overall concepts have changed all that much:)
What you want to do is implement a custom print processor. A print processor is the piece of code that takes the output that the printer driver generates and transports it to the output device. Print processors are implemented as regular user-mode DLLs. You should be able to find everything you need, including samples, in the Windows DDK.
A while ago we made a commercial application which captured print streams from any windows application and converted the result to XML and tiff images
We did make a prototype with the DDK, but ended up buying a SDK for the print capturing
The SDK was from BlackIce. Although it wasn´t a free SDK, the distribution of the runtimes were royalty free.
Implementation was done with Visual C (unmanaged) and VB6.
The printer driver had to be installed on the server/PC that drove the printing process.
I remember that the tricky part was to control the printer settings in runtime (keep the tiffs compressed, output directory for the files, paper size:A4 or Letter and other settings that were defined in the DEVMODE print control structure).
UPDATE: (Your comment to #Oleg about MO:DCA P triggered my memory. Although it is not about a printer driver...)
For our commercial product, we also had to make a customization to convert MO:DCA (AFP) documents to tiffs and XML.
This SDK had to be able to extract both images and ascii text to enable later conversions
Conversion where then made in batch from AFP documents in one folder to XML and tiffs.
We chose to convert the AFP file after it had been printed (not during print).
The SDK is SnowBound RasterMaster and is available in different flavours (we used the Windows API with ActiveX, and I see now that it is available for Java)
So if your requirement is to convert an AFP document to someting else (extract images and extract ascii text) you could try out the software from SnowBound. Make sure you also get the Optional Feature to be able to extract ASCII text from the MO DCA documents.
This software SDK is more expensive, but it did the job.
They offer a trial version here.
At the moment i have one missing link in your explanation, so let me rephrase what i understood:
You have a special printer driver on your windows system, that is configured to print into a file.
You like to have a simple batch program that can give something to this printer driver to output a binary file.
You have a toolchain where this file can be further processed.
Now my missing part is, what do you want to give to your little batch script, so that it produces your binary file? Do you have a Visio file which should be automatically printed through this driver?
If yes, you should take a look into this little batch script. It is able to take any file with a registered file extension and send it to the default printer with its default settings. By using these settings you are able to change the printer settings within your windows system from a batch file to make your special driver the default one and putting the output into a file.
So if i understood you correctly i didn't had the complete solution but i think a good starting point to accomplish your task.
Update
Ok, after reading your comment, i fully understood what you like to achieve. To get this to work you have to follow Per Larsens advice to write your own driver with the windows ddk (or to be more precise the Windows Driver Kit [WDK]) and encapsulate the already existing driver.
So in short and simple: Your driver signs up as new printer driver. When it is called it gets all the raw bytes from the application. Passes it into the driver that can generate your datafile. Get the output from that driver back and do with it whatever you like.
Some samples to get started can also be found in MSDN as overview or more precisely here.
But just to say it right beforehand: This is not an easy or simple task and the effort is quite high. Maybe trying to manipulate the driver settings of your special driver through the already given batches or a simple application (written with AutoIt) can also solve your problem, by just interacting (automatically) with the settings of the driver.
I can live with "When a user prints any file to this particular Windows printer, then automatically capture the bytes that would have been sent to the printer".
In that case, you want something like RedMon, which redirects the bytes which would have gone to the printer into the input for another program.
Just to reiterate, probably the simplest capture method is using a new Local Port configured as a filename. You can to monitor the output file as previously discussed to catch the output.
Otherwise, you want to write your own port monitor - not a printer driver or a print processor. All a port monitor does is receive the already rendered data from the printer driver, and sends it to the output device. So writing your own port monitor will allow you to go in and change the output port associated with the existing printer driver to be your own output port, and your port monitor can simply write the data to a file, probably one with a unique filename in a dedicated directory.
Printer drivers are far too complicated for what you want to do, and while a print processor could also capture the output data, you'd probably get entangled in some scantily documented system issues you won't want to have to figure out.
The LocalMon sample in the Windows Driver Kit is THE starting point for writing a port monitor. However, it manages all the system local ports and is quite a bit more complex than you need. In fact, much of it is just likely to confuse you. I'd recommend you start with LocalMon, and compare it to the Redmon source, which is much simpler because it manages a dedicated port. Beware that the Redmon source was taken from localmon long ago and appears to have a few bugs, so use Redmon as a reference and pare back the LocalMon code to what's needed to just write the output to a file.
You don't embed drivers in executables- drivers are for the operating system to communicate with the hardware.
You print via the Operating system.
Your 'batch' needs to select the correct printer, and print...
I get the queue from my targeted printer and goes through the list of jobs on it. When a job is not IsSpooling, I try to read the JobStream to see the print job.
So far JobStream has always been null. My printed stuff comes from on DOS application and should be pure text. I've Paused the printer to safe the rain forest, but I should still be able to get the spooled data, right?
Am I missing something, or is PrintSystemJobInfo.JobStream broken?
This value is almost always going to be null. Refer to this forum post: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=549634
If you want the actual binary JobStream your best bet is to read the spool file (.SPL) out of the "C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS" directory. You can pause the job before its printed, or set the "keep print jobs" setting as mentioned in the linked forum post. Be forewarned though, this data comes in a gamut of formats all depending on the driver creating the spool file and the application initiating the print. Extracting data out of this stream is no trivial task as it will change from printer driver to printer driver. If you are working with 1 single known printer, then you may have success.