I was wondering if anyone has any experience using a label printer from the Mac.

I have an application that needs to spit out individual labels one at a time and I need to suppress all of the print dialogs.

This particular application per habits the use of A sheet of labels through a laser printer.

I was looking at the Dymo Label Writer 450 to give you an idea. I would love to hear if anyone has any success with any other label printer.

I'm on Windows, but I've written an application that prints several thousand labels a month. Initially I tried the Dymo Label Writer Turbo 450 but had many difficulties and found the API less than friendly. I switched to the Brother Label Printer QL-700 ($60 on Amazon). Printing to them and integrating into Xojo was a snap. No API needed, just send what you want to the printer! We have about 5 of them and they've been very reliable. You can obtain aftermarket labels for them for dirt cheap as well (amazon).

you can either try to find a normal printer driver for using the built in print functions.
Or you use low level functions via serial or USB connection and send raw print data.

@Joseph E I'm on Windows, but I've written an application that prints several thousand labels a month. Initially I tried the Dymo Label Writer Turbo 450 but had many difficulties and found the API less than friendly. I switched to the Brother Label Printer QL-700 ($60 on Amazon). Printing to them and integrating into Xojo was a snap. No API needed, just send what you want to the printer! We have about 5 of them and they've been very reliable. You can obtain aftermarket labels for them for dirt cheap as well (amazon).

Joseph: Im curious. Were you able to suppress any print dialogs with the Brother Label Printer QL-700?

@Joseph E I'm on Windows, but I've written an application that prints several thousand labels a month. Initially I tried the Dymo Label Writer Turbo 450 but had many difficulties and found the API less than friendly. I switched to the Brother Label Printer QL-700 ($60 on Amazon). Printing to them and integrating into Xojo was a snap. No API needed, just send what you want to the printer! We have about 5 of them and they've been very reliable. You can obtain aftermarket labels for them for dirt cheap as well (amazon).

does the brother QL-700 printer work on mac as well??

@Joseph E I'm on Windows, but I've written an application that prints several thousand labels a month. Initially I tried the Dymo Label Writer Turbo 450 but had many difficulties and found the API less than friendly. I switched to the Brother Label Printer QL-700 ($60 on Amazon). Printing to them and integrating into Xojo was a snap. No API needed, just send what you want to the printer! We have about 5 of them and they've been very reliable. You can obtain aftermarket labels for them for dirt cheap as well (amazon).

does this brother QL700 required a power source or does it take the power from USB?? We are thinking of recommending this to a client who want to print QRCode.

I wrote also some simple code to deal with epson TML printers.( a TML-60 in my case)
it was easy as sending some ascii characters on the serial port, using a usb-to-serial adapter.
you can also do barcodes with it, although I didnt experiment it, it should be as simple.

Hi @Jay M

I did exactly that for a client. The only downside is that you need to plan the paper size (label size) you want to use in advance. The class work both for macOS and Windows.

Javier

@Joseph E I'm on Windows, but I've written an application that prints several thousand labels a month. Initially I tried the Dymo Label Writer Turbo 450 but had many difficulties and found the API less than friendly. I switched to the Brother Label Printer QL-700 ($60 on Amazon). Printing to them and integrating into Xojo was a snap. No API needed, just send what you want to the printer! We have about 5 of them and they've been very reliable. You can obtain aftermarket labels for them for dirt cheap as well (amazon).

I'm trying to use a QL-800, but the OpenPrinterDialog window says the label width is "not found". How can I set this before getting to the OpenPrinterDialog?

Thanks!

@Javier Meacute;ndez

I did exactly that for a client. The only downside is that you need to plan the paper size (label size) you want to use in advance. The class work both for macOS and Windows.

Javier

Is your class available anywhere? Or can you offer any suggestions for how to set the label size, or find out what size label is installed in the printer? I also don't see any ways to tell the printer whether or not to cut after each label. But first, I need to be able to print at all, then I can deal with the fancy stuff...:)

@John M I'm trying to use a QL-800

Here's a fairly comprehensive list of links to software and info about the QL series:

https://gist.github.com/pklaus/aeb55e18d36690df6a84a3eab49e9fd7

Hope something there can help. I have a QL700 but have not tried Xojo printing with it yet. Like yours, it a raster-only printer and doesn't support the ESC/P command set.

@Javier Meacute;ndez - +1 if you're able to share your class

@Tanner L Here's a fairly comprehensive list of links to software and info about the QL series:

This does help - along with Joseph Evert's sample project, I think I'm able to move forward. There are some puzzlements about page size and whether or not color is possible, but I'm working through those now.

Thank you!

- John

Let me start by saying that I acknowledge that many people may be very price sensitive when it comes to hardware such as label printers.

I'm building a solution now that will need to support label printing as well as receipt/ticket printing and we have elected to spend a little more for various pieces of hardware that offer an API for printing in addition to standard printer interfaces. Part of the reason we are going this direction is that the solution is web-based and print dialogs are not user-friendly for such common printing tasks. The upfront cost is as much as 3x per printer, but the time saved supporting the integration as well as time saved in the user's workflow will make up for this cost, not to mention shaving time an employee must spend interacting with the program while a customer waits.

I've found that the Star WEBPrnt API and the Zebra ZPL APIs are relatively simple to implement with the advantage of being able to have any user print to any piece of hardware as well as allowing automated tasks print. I'm rolling these integrations into modules which should make it very simple to integrate into any Xojo app.

@Jonathan E

I do agree with you but sometimes the environment where the printing will be done can dictate what equipment is used, for example in the Government environment I work in a web solution like you describe would not be allowed.

@brian franco I do agree with you but sometimes the environment where the printing will be done can dictate what equipment is used, for example in the Government environment I work in a web solution like you describe would not be allowed.

I'm not sure what type of environment in which you're working. No advice could apply to every use-case, just giving my 2 cents for those who read this thread in the future. It took a little time to find a decent selection of hardware to pull this off.

Out of curiosity, why wouldn't this be allowed in your environment? It does not make any calls to external servers; the devices are handling the requests entirely, so you do not have to expose any requests to the outside world (barring poor network infrastructure). If it's just that whichever alphabet soup agency hasn't approved any of the hardware that supports what I mention, I understand that.

@Jonathan E I'm building a solution now ... and we have elected to spend a little more for various pieces of hardware that offer an API for printing in addition to standard printer interfaces. ... The upfront cost is as much as 3x per printer,...

I haven't gone down this road for Xojo yet, but this thread had earlier references to Brother QL-7xx series printers. I was recently looking at the follow on, QL-810W, which can be networked attached via wifi. It is only $130 or so, and the non-wifi version is under $100 -- and they have an API as well. At least allegedly. My immediate use was for AirPrint, not desktop or web app, so I have not looked at the API yet.

But they are way cheaper than any other label printer i found which does AirPrint.