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January 5, 2011 12:37 PM

How do I print Eastern European characters via card printer on a non-Windows server?

We are trying to print little cards for a customer's production site - in the Czech Republic. These are going to have people's names on them, so we would prefer to be able to print the correct ISO-8859-2 (or Unicode or whatever) character so that Lukáš and Kateřina don't look like Luk?? and Kate?ina.

Tough part? Our software is on Linux, so most card printers I've found that can support non-Latin-1 characters require a Windows print driver.

I called Zebra and they say their card printers don't support any character sets other than Latin-1.

I do have access to both TrueType and PS1 fonts that are Linux compatible and support this character set.

The card printer needs to be networkable and either supplies us with a control language we can use for us to develop in to send or can handle one of the outputs from Apache's FOP.

Has anybody come across this before or can anyone recommend a solution (card printer and way to print these characters)?

posted by jillithd to Technology (9 answers total)

Best answer: I am making some assumptions here, hopefully correct.

1) That you can add PDFs to your workflow on the Linux side (it looks like FOP deals with PDF)
2) that you can print PDFs on your printer (i.e., that it doesn't have to accept only text input)

I work at a translation company, and we convert all our documents to PDF before printing; it's the only way to guarantee that printers made normally for Western European character sets can deal with Amharic, Hindi, Czech, etc.

3) that you could add some dumb windows box (or wine emulator) in as an intermediate step to print to a Windows-stupid printer. It should rasterize all of your output, so the fonts shouldn't matter.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:09 PM on January 5, 2011

Response by poster: 1) yes, FOP can output PDF with Latin-2 characters
2) need to find a printer first! The card printers I've looked at use drivers to convert documents to what the printer can print. Maybe we can send 'em PDFs - might be a good idea to try.
3) we'd rather stay away from a windows box (licensing fees, extra box, networking, another monitor, etc) - this is in a production setting where we want our software (or scripts) to automate the process so the operator can keep on producing.
posted by jillithd at 1:23 PM on January 5, 2011

Yeah, if you can get away with delivering print-ready PDFs to the client, and have output be something THEY can sort out (with faster response time on their end), I would highly highly recommend it. I would sincerely hope that a Czech-based client could source printers compatible with Czech!
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 1:47 PM on January 5, 2011

What kind of cards are you talking about? Like rigid plastic ID cards? Or paper cardstock?

I can't believe any production-type of printer (paper or plastic) doesn't support downloadable fonts, or have support for printing rasters.

Can you give us a couple of model numbers of printers you'd like to use, if it was possible?
posted by gjc at 4:17 PM on January 5, 2011

Response by poster: Yes, they are like rigid plastic ID cards. :)

An example would be something similar to the Zebra P330i but according to their Programming Manual (2MB PDF) it only supports Arial Normal and Arial Bold and only handles ACSII and Extended ASCII characters.
posted by jillithd at 4:44 PM on January 5, 2011

Best answer: Some idle digging has found more information. You are not the first to have issues with the Zebra.

One promising thing is rumours of PDF-to-ZPL filters for CUPS.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=409799

There's also an earlier ask MeFi about trying to hack a different Zebra printer to work with OS X which might have some relevant answers.

Finally, it does sound like some Zebra printers are able to handle Unicode. I would check to see if they do have a Unicode-compatible badge printer on the market by now, or if they have an upgrade for the model you're looking at. That would allow you to send straight text to the printer, and dodge around a lot of the fancier workarounds that I was proposing above.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 6:14 PM on January 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Ah, disregard above blather. I found Zebra's own page of which printers currently have Unicode support. I would recommend limiting your research to these, unless there's a very compelling reason (price?) to choose a different model.

Zebra's Global Printing Solution (with list of compatible printers, which does NOT include the P330i)
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 6:20 PM on January 5, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks, Ivan. Unfortunately those are all label printers and not card printers. But perhaps that is a solution as well - print a label and stick it to a card (not as automatic as preferred, but a possible solution).
posted by jillithd at 7:04 AM on January 6, 2011

Yeah, as long as you're not looking at ID Badges or something, I think a label printer would be a better solution. Probably substantially cheaper printer and print stock, for that matter.

If your client isn't doing huge print runs, by the time the additional labor costs have a chance to add up, there might be a decent Unicode card printer on the market for them to upgrade to.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 10:38 AM on January 6, 2011