ZPL II Extended Characters
- by Mauro
I'm trying to print extended code page 850 characters using ZPL II to a Zebra S4M. Whenever one of the extended characters I.E. ASCII value 127 is used I get a box of varying shades of grey instead of the actual value.
I'm trying to print ± and ° (ALT+0177 and ALT+0176). I suspect its the RawPrinterHelper I am trying to use (as downloaded from MS, and another from CodeProject) however I cant see where the character codes are going wrong.
Weirdly, printing direct from Notepad renders the correct characters, which leads me to believe it is a problem with the raw printer helper class.
I am not tied to using the Raw Printer Helper class so if there is a better way of doing it, I am more than happy to see them.
SAMPLE ZPLII
Without escaped chars
^XA
^FO30,200^AD^FH,18,10^FD35 ± 2 ° ^FS
^FS
^XZ
With escaped chars (tried both upper and lower case)
^XA
^FO30,200^AD^FH,18,10^FD35 _b0 2 _b1 ^FS
^FS
^XZ
Raw Printer Helper
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct DOCINFO
{
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
public string printerDocumentName;
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
public string pOutputFile;
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
public string printerDocumentDataType;
}
public class RawPrinter
{
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = false,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long OpenPrinter(string pPrinterName, ref IntPtr phPrinter, int pDefault);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = false,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long StartDocPrinter(IntPtr hPrinter, int Level, ref DOCINFO pDocInfo);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long StartPagePrinter(IntPtr hPrinter);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Ansi, ExactSpelling = true,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long WritePrinter(IntPtr hPrinter, string data, int buf, ref int pcWritten);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long EndPagePrinter(IntPtr hPrinter);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long EndDocPrinter(IntPtr hPrinter);
[
DllImport("winspool.drv", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true,
CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern long ClosePrinter(IntPtr hPrinter);
public static void SendToPrinter(string printerJobName, string rawStringToSendToThePrinter,
string printerNameAsDescribedByPrintManager)
{
IntPtr handleForTheOpenPrinter = new IntPtr();
DOCINFO documentInformation = new DOCINFO();
int printerBytesWritten = 0;
documentInformation.printerDocumentName = printerJobName;
documentInformation.printerDocumentDataType = "RAW";
OpenPrinter(printerNameAsDescribedByPrintManager, ref handleForTheOpenPrinter, 0);
StartDocPrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter, 1, ref documentInformation);
StartPagePrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter);
WritePrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter, rawStringToSendToThePrinter, rawStringToSendToThePrinter.Length,
ref printerBytesWritten);
EndPagePrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter);
EndDocPrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter);
ClosePrinter(handleForTheOpenPrinter);
}
}
