Printing to a wireless Zebra printer ( QL320 )

david — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:45:00 GMT

For one of my ongoing projects I need to send print jobs to wireless industrial printers. Specifically the Zebra QL series printers. After much pain and a little suffering I figured it out. There are some good documentation points on the web that discuss the actual printing 'language' CPCL/EPL/EPL2. However if you want a quick and dirty way to print do this:

Load up Zebra's Label Vista software and design a label.

Put your text on the label and your bar codes where you want them.

For each text element or bar code use placeholders like this: {BARCODE1} {LABEL1}.

When you have your layout the way you want it save the label and load the resultant .lbl file up in notepad. Copy that text to your clipboard. Now load up your favorite terminal application like PuTTY. Connect to the printer via IP or Serial. Paste the clipboard into the terminal window and the printer should print your label.

Well what good is that you might say? The next step is to make your application replace the {BARCODE1} placeholders with the values you wish to print and then send that to the printer. You basically can design a label template in Label Vista and then your application can use that template to merge your values into the placeholders in the template. As far as connecting to the printer in your application I will cover that in a few days. I will release a Zebra label printing API in C# that does everything you need for simple quick and dirty printing to the Zebra printers.

Professional Software Architecture : API, C#

Printing to a wireless Zebra printer ( QL320 )