anyone can please tell me the code how to print documents on dot matrix printer in C# windows application.
You can print to dot matrix "graphically", which is built-in in Windows, albeit slower.
But if you only want to print pure text with simple formattings, you need to send escape commands to your dot matrix printer, which is faster than graphical printing. Different printers has different escape commands.
Here are typical escape commands(for epson): http://www.printfil.com/manualen/c5.htm
This might help: https://web.archive.org/web/20051212193242/http://sacpcug.org:80/archives/0306/prc0603.html
What I do in VB6 then was to print to Generic / Text Only printer, you open the PRN or LPT1 as a file handle, then print escape commands on the file handle, all escape commands will be redirected to whatever printer is attached to LPT1 or PRN. You can do the same thing with C#, just open the PRN or LPT1 as a file, then print to it.
To add Generic / Text Only printer, Control Panel > Printers > Add Printer. On manufacturer, select Generic, then on printers, select Generic / Text only.
You can do the same (printing on Generic / Text Only) for Zebra printers which have their own escape commands for printing bar codes, which is faster than letting Windows print to it graphically.
When you print to an inkjet or laser printer, you generally do not use built-in fonts of the printer. You use Windows fonts. What happens is that the printer driver either builds an image of pixels (including the text) and sends it to the printer, or sends commands designed to draw lines, spline curves, and other shapes to the printer, with fonts expressed as lines and splines (outlines).
When you print to an older dot matrix printer, you can do it that way, but it’s slow. Each line of text has to be “built” from pixels, and often the lines of text do not match up with the passes of the print head (especially for fonts much larger or smaller than 12-point).
The old way of using these printers, the way they were intended, was to send the actual ASCII codes of the text to the printer. Send the number 65 (decimal), and you get a capital (upper-case) “A” for instance. The number 49 (decimal) would print the digit “1” while the number 32 would be a blank space, 33 an exclamation point (“!”), and so on. One byte = one character. The dot-matrix printer had its own built-in font, and would look the ASCII code up in its font ROM, and from there determine the exact timings of which print wires would have to strike the page exactly when to produce those letters.
By using ESCape codes, you could specify such effects as pseudo-boldfaced (basically striking the letter twice, with the second copy shifted to the right by only one dot width), double-wide (striking each column of wires twice in a row for each one time that it would normally be struck, thus doubling the width of the letter), underline (striking the bottom print wire throughout regardless of whether the letter shape calls for it at that point or not), and so on.
The printer’s own ROM handled all of these mechanical details about print wires and such. All your program had to supply is the actual ASCII codes of the text (including control codes such as the number 13 [Carriage Return aka CR] to return the print head to the left margin [or, for a bidirectional printer, prepare to print the next line in the reverse order of the previous line], usually followed by the number 10 [Line Feed aka LF] to roll the paper up one line to prepare for printing the next line).
If you wanted to print in fancy fonts that the printer didn’t have, or print graphics, you had to use an ESCape code to set the printer into “graphics mode” in which you basically sent bytes whose bits would specify to fire the individual wires of the printhead under direct program control, rather than looking up character shapes in the printer’s Font ROM. When you print normally from Windows using a printer-specific driver, this is usually what happens.
For daisy-wheel or other fixed-character printers (e.g. IBM Selectric type-ball mechanisms), the ASCII code would spin the wheel or ball to the proper position and then strike the ribbon and thus print the letter on the page, or send the right hammer up to hit the ribbon and thus the page (TeleType or old typewriter mechanism). It was not possible to do pixel graphics with these except by printing repeated periods and micro-advancing the print head and paper the width/height of a period instead of a character / row of text, respectively (which would generally wear out the period character of the daisy-wheel or ball really quickly, so many of them had metal-reinforced periods for that very reason).
How is this different from printing on inkjet or laser printer?
MSDN: Printing Overview
Preview and Print from Your Windows Forms App with the .NET Printing Namespace
Whilst it wasn't in C#, I have written Access reports that used the native fonts of an Epson printer. It was a few year ago - using Windows XP - but when the printer was selected as the default it was possible to choose the "native" fonts of the printer via the font chooser.
It was pretty neat - I could use any font I liked for the headings, which were slow to print. Then I could select the native printer font for the detail rows, which were fast. Doing it that way I had to be careful that all the "native" font detail stauff had exactly the same vertical alignment, otherwise it became slow again.
Related
I need to enter a text to existing pdf (in top or bottom of the page) in c#.
I need to make sure that I dont overwrite any visible text or image.
Is there any way I could check an area in pdf if it contains text, image, control etc? I understand it will not be 100% accurate
You're going to need a full PDF consumer at the very least, because the only way to find out where the marks are on the page is to parse (and possibly render) the PDF.
There are complications which you haven't covered (possibly they have not occurred to you); what do you consider to be the area of the PDF file ? The MediaBox ? CropBox, TrimBox, ArtBox, BleedBox ? What if the PDF file contains, for example, a rectangular fill with white which covers the page ? What about a /Separation space called /White ? is that white (it generally gets rendered that way on the output) or not ? And yes, this is a widely used ink in the T-shirt printing industry amongst others.
To me the simplest solution would seem to be to use a tool which will give you the BoundingBox of marks on the page. I know the Ghostscript bbox device can do this, I imagine there are other tools which can do so. But note (for Ghostscript at least); if there are any marks in white (whatever the colour space), these are considered as marking the page and will be counted into the bbox.
The same tool ought to be able to give the size of the various Boxes in the PDF file (you'd need the pdf_info.ps program for Ghostscript to get this, currently). You can then quickly calculate which areas are unmarked.
But 'unmarked' isn't the same things as 'white'. If you want to not count areas which are painted in 'white' then the problem becomes greater. You really need to render the content and then look at each image sample in the output to see if its white or not, recording the maxima and minima of the x and y co-ordinates to determine the 'non-white' area of the page.
This is because there are complications like transfer functions, transparency blending, colour management, and image masking, any or all of which might cause an area which is marked with a non-white colour to be rendered white (a transparency SMask for example) or an area marked with white to be rendered non-white (eg a transfer function).
Your question is unclear because you haven't defined whether any of these issues are important to you, and how you want to treat them.
I have a windows application which is responsible for printing customized barcode labels roll based on user's needs like specifying the texts, dimensions and size.
The user will use Zepra and TSC barcode printers, I just need to know how to let the user choose determine the size of label and the space between labels and also the all margins (top, right, bottom and left).
I need a code-snippet does that in C# and the final result to be like this.
So, any ideas?
For Zebra part:
Here is an example how to send ZPL commands into printer:
https://km.zebra.com/kb/index?page=content&id=SA301&cat=ZISV_PL_ZPL&actp=LIST
Here you can find pdf document from ZPL commands which are send to printer. Build a suitable set of codes which will produce the label and barcode that you need:
https://www.zebra.com/content/dam/zebra/manuals/en-us/software/zpl-zbi2-pm-en.pdf
Happy Coding!
I'm trying to print a pdf with Ghostscript using those settings :
var switches = new List<string>
{
#"-empty",
#"-dPrinted",
#"-dNOPAUSE",
#"-dNOSAFER",
#"-dQUIET",
#"-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer",
#"-dNumCopies=1",
#"-sDEVICE=mswinpr2",
#"-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4",
#"-sOutputFile=%printer%" + printerSettings.PrinterName,
#"-f",
pdfFileName
};
but either the pdf or Ghostscript have bad margins and while it's good when I print it to file it clips when I print it on my printer.
Is there any way to add those programatically with Ghostscript ? I tried many different solutions from first pages of google but none of them work and they seem to have no effect on the printed pdf.
When I try to print it out with Adobe or IE it magicaly adds margins as soon as I choose the printer and it prints fine.
How to achive the same with Ghostscript ?
OK well the first thing is that many of the switches you are setting have no effect:
-empty isn't a Ghostscript-understood switch, and I'm slightly surprised it doesn't cause an error.
-dPDFSETTINGS only affects the pdfwrite device, which is why it is documented in the vector devices section.
-dCompatabilityLevel only affects the output of the pdfwrite device.
-dNOSAFER doesn't have any effect, as that's the default setting.
-f is used to 'close' direct PostScript insertion begun with -c, if you don't use -c you don't need -f
Now almost certainly neither Ghostscript nor your PDF has 'bad margins', the most likely explanation for your problem is that the printer you are using cannot print to the boundaries of the page, the left/right edges, and potentially the top and bottom edges are used by the paper transport mechanism, and the printer cannot print there.
In order to deal with that, you will need to reduce the size of the image, which you can 'probably' do by setting -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS and -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS and -dFIXEDMEDIA. Its going to be up to you to work out the correct values for width and height.
Added after the comments below
There are two parts to this problem, the first is to deduce the size of the actual available area to print on, and to scale the output to that size. The second is to then reposition the output on the media so that it is all printed. If as you say the content is significantly smaller than the media then you can ignore rescaling it, but the entire solution is presented here for completeness.
Now as previously mentioned, the first part of this is achieved primarily by creating a fixed size canvas; this is done with any of the media selection switches and the addition of -dFIXEDMEDIA.
NOTE if you alter the media size, then you must, obviously, also alter the scale of the contents, or it won't fit. So you also need to set PSFitPage, EPSFitPage or PDFFitPage depending on the type of input (very recent versions of Ghostscript can use -dFitPage no matter what the input type).
As an experiment I used the file /ghostpdl/examples/text_graphic_image.pdf and sent the output to a printer on FILE:
This command line:
gswin32 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=391 -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=306 -dFIXEDMEDIA -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 -sOutputFile=%printer%KensPrinter /ghostpdl/examples/text_graphic_image.pdf
produces output where 3/4 the image is clipped away (the content lies off the newly defined fixed canvas size). If I modify that to:
gswin32 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=391 -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=306 -dFIXEDMEDIA -dPDFFitPage -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 -sOutptuFile=%printer%KensPrinter /ghostpdl/examples/text_graphic_image.pdf
then the result is a perfect reproduction of the original, at 1/4 the size (half in each direction).
So, the first thing you need to do is establish the actual printable area of the media on your printer, then you can set the width and height correctly as fixed media, and tell Ghostscript to scale the page to fit.
However, this will still leave the printed image at the bottom left of the media. Since that's in an area that can't be printed, you need to shift the printed image until its centred on the page. As I suggested, you can do this with a BeginPage procedure. This:
gswin32 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=391 -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=306 -dFIXEDMEDIA -dPDFFitPage -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 -sOutptuFile=%printer%KensPrinter -c "<</BeginPage {100 100 translate}>> setpagedevice" -f /ghostpdl/examples/text_graphic_image.pdf
produces output where the printed image is shifted up and right by 100 points each.
I believe that a little investigation will allow you to figure out where exactly your printer is able to print, and to create appropriately sized unprintable margins.
Note that, for me, the %printer% syntax does not result in a printer selection dialog. I suspect that your code (whatever language that is) is expanding the %p, resulting in a corruption of the name. Or possibly whatever you use to fork a Ghostscritp process does it. In either event you probably need to double the % signs.
You should get this working from the command line first, then work on getting it into an application.
As per suggestion and provided link by #HansPassant and #Juan from (C# POS receipt printing issue), i have made the changes in code and now writing the print commands directly to the printer, bypassing the driver (using RawPrinterHelper class). But still there is an issue with the POS printer receipt. It is not taking full width to print the row though the text is not cutting now and it is showing as full text (Screenshot attached)
But as you can see in screenshot, there are enough space left in between the right side border (Marked black) and where the text ends. If text is large string then it breaks into new line but not printing to the right side.The receipt is printing with max width which is up-to the end of dotted line.Rest right side part is blank.
Also, Can you tell me how to print Rupee Symbol before the price or amount while writing the print commands directly to the printer. Earlier when i was using the printer driver for a POS printer, there in c# code i was writing as following:
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("hi-IN"); String.Format(ci, "{0:c}",ProductPrice);
But this is not working with print commands directly to the printer. It prints as "?" as you can see just before the price of each item in attached screenshot.
Thanks in advance.
//Please don't close this post due to subjective reasons.
I'm developing a form-filling winform application which generates a PDF file on submitting the information. The PDF file need to contain barcodes encoding some information entered by user. The user prints the PDF file and put signature on it and faxes it back to us. I need suggestions for choosing which barcode symbology to use for this applcation.
The barcode needs to satisfy the following conditions.
1)The barcode need to encode upto 120 characters
Since the barcode need to encode a lot of information, I think 2D Barcode would be better as it can store with much high information density.
2)Only upper case alphabets and numbers need to be encoded
Though most of the 2D barcodes can store more than numbers, there are some 1D barcodes such as code 39 that cannot represent all alphabets.
3)Preferable size of barcode is 1.5 inch height and 8 inch width
This is what is the most challenging requirement. I'm planning to place the barcode below the information such as account id. So it would be good if barcode takes the shape of a rectangle whose information capacity increases with its width. This requirement is suitable for 1D barcodes. Also, since 2D barcodes takes the shape of a square, a lot of space will be wasted on either side of barcode.
4)Error correcting capability
2D barcodes have better error correcting capability. Only some 1D barcodes have error correction with it. This is not an essential requirement.
5)The barcode need to be faxed from one country to another
The barcode is generated on a PDF. The PDF will be printed and then need to be faxed. So, the barcode needs to have high resolution. Otherwise, I fear that the scanner cannot decode data correctly. I'm thinking a resoltion of 200dpi is enough for the barcode image. Is there any problem to fax 2D barcodes as they need to be scanned both horizontally and verically. I have heard like fax have different resolution vertically and horizontally. Does this create any problem when scanning barcodes.
6)Easiness to program in c# to generate barcode
Atlast but not the least, I need to program this barcode generation myselfin c#. So, there should be some free library available for the same. Aspose barcode is a good one. But it is costly.
I have come across the following Barcodes. I have checked the specification of some of these types. But couldn't reach a final decision. I can't turn back once I choose a barcode and start programming.
1D: UPC/EAN/JAN, Code 39, Code 128, Interleaved 2 of 5, Codabar, Code 11, Code 93, NEC 2 of 5, Matrix 2 of 5, Trioptic Code,
Stacked 1D: PDF417, Micro PDF417, Codablock A & F, Composite Codes
2D: Data Matrix, QR Code, Micro QR Code, Aztec Code, Maxicode
I am thinking of using PDF417. Does it have any disadvantages?
I don't know all formats so I can't say which is best.
Some of the 1D barcodes you mention (UPC/EAN) support only a small number of numeric characters. I know Code 128 supports variable length alphanumeric values, so that probably is a good 1D candidate.
Some barcode readers don't support 2D barcodes, this is usually a reason to use 1D.
Of 2D you should see if there is a symbology that does not require the barcode to be a square, because that would limit your maximum size to 1.5 by 1.5 inches.
There are several websites that let you create barcodes as images - perhaps you should just create a PDF containing those and fax them to see what happens.
I don't know of any free libraries to render them with; there are also fonts out there that allow creating 1D barcodes, and you can embed these fonts into your winforms application.
EDIT: 200 dpi on 8x1.5 inches would give you 1600 dots horizontally and 300 dots vertically to work with. A code128 barcode with a bar width of 1 pixel would come out at under 1400 dots.
On the wikipedia page for QR there is an example that takes up to 174 characters that has a size of 57x57 and high error correction. If I'm not mistaking, each dot could be represented by 5x5 pixels in 200dpi.