Spooling Thermal Shipping Label Data From Web Site

Question

I need help trying to get thermal shipping label data from a Web site to a local Zebra printer. The data itself is just plain text but spooling it from a Web site seems to be very difficult for some reason. Does anyone have any experience with this? I am using ColdFusion 8 and Windows Server 2008.

Answer 1

• Your print data could be sent with a MIME type (there probably is one for it, but you could make one up too)
• On the client's PC, they could have that MIME type mapped to a program that simply prints whatever it receives.

Setting the MIME type on a PC can be done with code or a .REG file. If you control the user's environment, that's pretty simple. Making a program that dumps whatever it receives is also easy. That would be a nice task for Visual C or good, old VB6. Very little code. As long as the user has the .EXE and the .REG file, they'll print reliably, every time, without the browser's crap getting in the way. (think of this as what happens when you click a link to a PDF - Acrobat opens. Well, have the little printing EXE open for your file type - easy).

This is familiar to me... I think I did this with a proprietary font set... AH! Yes, I had to do this to generate mortgage documents that used proprietary fonts for drawing the pretty lines. I was able to take a proprietary, stand-alone mortgage origination server, share the folder where the mortgage .PRN files had been created. A Web server with access to that share enumerate the files in the share to a Web page, then, when users clicked on a file, the .PRN would stream to their PCs where a corresponding .EXE would see it as one of its own and send it to the correct output device (a designated printer at their location). That dumb little piece of code eliminated 126 document servers (and their maintenance and licensing costs) instantly and mortgage documents were never lost or sent to the wrong branch by mistake again. I think it took 3 hours to get it all working from inception to testing at the branches.

Yeah, same thing here. It'll work. Trust me. It'll work.