[ic] Linux label printers

[Grant]

> > I've got a decoded digital TIF to print now, but I need to figure out
> > how to get the printer to spit it out.  I'm going to tinker with it
> > into the night I hope.
> >
> > Please let me know if you can offer any guidance on going from a Linux
> > system with no printing set up, to a Linux system printing to one of
> > these Zebra LP 2844s from within a usertag.
> >
> 
> Hi Grant,
> 
> Some background for FedEx you may (or may not) find helpful.  The
> Business::Fedex::DirectConnect my business partner wrote can return EPL code
> instead of a raster PNG or GIF image.
> 
> EPL (Eltron Printer Language) is an ASCII-based code when piped to any
> Eltron or
> Zebra printer supporting EPL (most do including yours) will quickly spit out a
> label.  In a recent application, we simply opened a printer handle using lpd
> and output the ASCII code.  Here is some psudocode:
> 
> use Business::FedEx::DirectConnect;
> my $t = Business::FedEx::DirectConnect->new();
> $t->set_data(); $t->transaction();
> 
> open PRINTERHANDLE, "| lp -d zebra" || die "Can't open printer!";
> print PRINTERHANDLE $t->label;
> close PRINTERHANDLE;
> 
> This method does away with TIFFs, GIFs, PNGs or any other raster
> images.  And I
> am pretty sure UPS's API also supports EPL/ZPL as well.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> - Brian

Thanks Brian and Jon.  I'm getting more intimate with this and I
realize the digital TIF will reside on the server and I need a way to
send it to the local printer.  Looking at both Jon's and Brian's perl
code and "man open" it seems like the open command is the way to go
about this.  Do you guys execute an open command from within the
usertag, or do you execute a local script that uses open?  If you are
executing a local script, how do you get the label data from the IC
server to the local machine?

- Grant