Printing to Receipt Printer from Web Application

Question

This is more a question if I am taking a 'wrong path' to accomplish the task.

I need to print Data to Receipt Printers from Web Application.

Based on what I understand from various posts on net, it seems best option would be to create something like a Print Server (not sure about the name). This will be C# desktop application running as a service. I am planning to put messages in queue and Print Server to pull messages from queue and print it to reconfigured LAN printers. I will be using POS.NET to connect to POS devices.

Added advantage (to using Javascript/pdf solutions) is that I can enhance the same "Print Server" to send information to display system. The message system could be decoupled to be on cloud so as to print in a different geographical area, like warehouse. If I target Framework 3.5 for the service, I can get rid of POS.NET issues with Framework 4.0 plus versions.

Am I reinventing something that is already available in .Net or possibly an open-source application?

I found these kind of similar questions

• How to print from web application to receipt printer?
• Configuring a POS printer for remote printing

which were helpful but did not answer my question in full.

Answer 1

I had a to do exactly this, and after many hours of searching, I could not find anything. I achieved this by installing Thunderbird (any email client will do) and send the receipt via email to the account linked up to that client, I then setup a rule on the email client to print out anything it recieved.