Fedex thermal labels

[istdesigns.com]

Has anyone ever got the Automated Fedex Labels contribution to work with the Eltron LP2844 printer?

I've tried changing the printer settings inside fedexdc.php but that brings up a blank page with the ASTRA barcode placeholder. Can't seem to send the raw data directly to the printer for decoding / printing. Searched the forums both here and at OSC for days now to no avail.

So far, I've only got this contribution to work using PNG files and a laser printer on plain paper. The contribution works great that way, just won't work at all for a standard thermal printer (from what I can tell).

Anybody find a fix for this yet?

Thanks in advance!
Bret

[jpf]

Thermal barcode printers is in no way compatable with how laser printers or dot-matrix printers work (atlease they can print plain text if given - most thermals can't! They print graphically only.). The only way is if you have a Windows Driver and you can print from the web though that driver to that printer. That way the driver does the translation and conversion to the bitmap format it needs. Thermal printers don't normally work with PNP graphics - try using PCX or a plain bit map version - not a compressed version like PNP or JPEG.

These thermal printers often have speciallized software to print lables and may not be compatable with ANY other software. Most custom programs that use a Thermal printer - often only work with one or two specific types of the dozens that are out there.

Beleave me - I use to sell Barcode and thermal hardware and supplies.

[istdesigns.com]

Understood. The reason I was asking this is because in the contribution there are settings for thermal printers. Now the trick is FedEx sends the thermal printer data in a stream, which the contribution is capable of processing. The problem I'm having is the contribution wants to open the returned data in a new browser window because the guy that wrote it uses only laser printers. So it works fine when it's a PNG graphic, but for the thermal to work, it needs to go directly to the printer via the serial port.

So, there's some coding that needs to be changed in the file. I am confident everything is there, but don't know what to change to stream the data directly to the printer. Some posts on OSCommerce stated open a pipe to the printer. I haven't figured that out, and don't know where to code it. It would be a very worthy tweak to this contribution (Automated FedEx Labels is the title if I remember correctly).