Re^3: using Brother QL-570 printer with Perl

It might or might not be useful to do some more research into the printer and its surrounding infrastructure. If the printer is accessed through a serial connection over USB, you might get lucky and be able to use whatever serial printing protocol is available. Maybe even using PCL5 already is enough.

If the printer uses a custom USB protocol, you're lost unless you can reverse engineer the (Windows) printer driver or find out how to make a Windows printer driver work with CUPS, much like ndiswrapper does for Windows network card drivers.

Comment on Re^3: using Brother QL-570 printer with Perl

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Re^4: using Brother QL-570 printer with Perl by Bruce32903 (Scribe) on Aug 03, 2011 at 15:59 UTC
So far I have not found anything that is not "use the Windows software" oriented. I have had good luck using the printer (for about a year) using Open Office and Linux. But, so far I have been using Open Office's "File --> New --> Drawing" drawing editor to create the barcode and then hand paste the bar code into the Open Office document. This takes quite a bit of time. I have done this over and over for the several hundred parts in our system and saved the files for reuse. But, now I want to generate serial number bar codes "on the fly". The manual method is far too time consuming. The printer is connected to the PC via USB. I don't know if I could figure out anything by looking at the USB data. So far Windows seems to be much more dominant for USB sniffing. So far I have not had success with apt-getting "snooper", "snoopy", "usb-snooper", "usb-mon" or any of the other USB sniffers that show up on Google hits. (my notes are not in front of me, I may have misspelled some of them). I also can not get Wireshark to work with USB. I am running Ubuntu 9.04. It seems like some of the USB tools might require recompiling the kernel or other admin level tasks that are beyond me. Every Google path seems to have a brick wall at the end of it. I am someone who just uses Perl as a tool. For about 10 years I have 3-5 times a year needed something done. At these times I dust off my Perl books and try to get it done. Being self taught at this I have a few areas with a lot of experience and several areas with huge gaps in fundamental knowledge. Thus, I could be missing something simple. Thank you, Bruce	[reply]
Re^5: using Brother QL-570 printer with Perl by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 03, 2011 at 16:27 UTC
So, how does Open Office print to the printer? Find out how Open Office (or Libre Office) does it, and then do that, just by Perl. Or create the appropriate Open Office documents in Perl and use or automate Open Office to print them, if it is beyond your abilities to find out how Open Office itself does it.	[reply]