How to setup html file for printing with thermal printer

Question

My objective is printing 10cm x 6.5cm labels for products. I have a Zebra printer for printing labels. I was using Fast-reports for Printing labels by using handheld. Since fast-reports is only for Net Framework and not for Net CF, I was using sockets to handle data between handheld and pc.

Desktop applications hard to make stable for my knowledge of c#. I am a PHP dev. so I thought I can create labels with HTML & CSS since barcodes can also done with php.

The reason I am asking this question because I don't know how to send html page to printer and What sizes should I use for 10cm x 6.5cm with pixels for best quality printing.

Answer 1

Might be a little late for a response but I was facing the exact same problem back in the day and to accomplish what you describe I approached in a weird way that eventually worked. The steps that I describe don't affect the UI but it renders your HTML without the user noticing.

1. Render the HTML on a Webview that won't be visible to the user and set a WebViewClientCallback that will be called as soon that your WebViewRenders your html.

   var webview = new Android.Webkit.WebView(Common.Instance);
   webview.Layout(0, 0, widthOfHTML, heightOfHtml);
   webview.Settings.LoadWithOverviewMode = true;
   webview.Settings.UseWideViewPort = true;
   webview.LoadDataWithBaseURL("file:///android_asset/", template, "text/HTML", "UTF-8", null);
   webview.SetWebViewClient(new WebViewClientCallback());
   

2. In you webviewClient callback override the OnPageFinished method that will

   public class WebViewClientCallback : WebViewClient
   {
       public override async void OnPageFinished(WebView myWebview, string url)
       {
            // Render webview to a bitmap
            var bitmap = Bitmap.CreateBitmap(myWebview.Width, myWebview.Height + 50, Bitmap.Config.Argb8888);
   
            // Code to print bitmap
       }
   }