Printing to an Epson Receipt Printer...

[fdgsogc]

I have a prospect that wants to buy an Epson Thermal Receipt Printer (model TM-T88III).

I have a software vendor that creates reports with the .NET version of Crystal Reports.

QUESTION: Is writing a report to this type of printer the same as any other printer or are we still into the "dot matrix" land of line feeds etc.

CORROLARY: A receipt report is different in that it has no fixed report length. There is no page break until the report is finished printing all content. How does Crystal Reports handle that?

Here are the technical specs on the printer in question.

http://pos.epson.com/pos/pdf/t88iii_ds.pdf

 

[synapsevampire]

As with most Windows programs, printing is controlled by the printer driver in Windows, if you're using Windows...

So the paper choices should include something akin to continuous in that instance.

Crystal doesn't overide the settings.

Check with the vendor to learn if they have an appropriate Windows driver.

-k

 

[Golom]

The Epson TM-T88 series printers are thermal printers and Crystal can print to them quite successfully. Note that they are limited to 40 (or 42 depending on the specific model) print positions so a report formatted for a standard page (8.5 x 11) will be truncated on a TM-T88.

Do a Google search for "Epson Advanced Printer Driver" and you will see lots of descriptions of this driver and lots of places where you can download it.

 

[fdgsogc]

Are you guys saying then that there is no special programming required to get a Crystal report to print on the TM-T88? Other than creating a Crystal report who's page setup is set to 3 inches instead of 8 inche width?

 

[Golom]

Sort of. Most full-page printers can handle graphics, arbitrary font sizes, color, etc. Receipt printers like the TM-T88 series are much more restrictive. Some models can handle two colors; most are monochrome. You are usually restricted to 8, 10 or 12 point fonts (see the manual). There are several built-in fonts that allow double-height and/or double-width printing.

In essence, if you develop reports that are the correct widths and use only monochrome text of a fixed size then you're probably OK. If you try to get fancier then problems will ensue.