POS Printer - Printing in .NET

0
votes

If this thread already exists my honest apologies.

Currently I am in development of some cool EPOS system (at the beginning :)) I have got EPSON TM-T88III Printer and developing everything in C# and .NET 4.5 .

Currently I am doing the printing in a fashion of printing graphics like so :

graphic.DrawString(ord.name, font, b, startX, startY + offset);
offset += (int)fontheight + 5;

but the printer takes time to print stuff. I would like to get it printed using some king of POS API or something to make it faster. The problem is I don't know where to start and what options are available to me.

Short tutorial to print one two lines of text would be much appreciated !

Thanks in advance, David

1
c#printing
In case you are using Epsons OPOS driver: A user in this thread found out (quote): "To speed up the printing I manually formatted the strings printed (ie left, right, centre justification) and left the use of character size commands to a minimum. By submitting your print jobs as one string (including Carriage Return Line Feeds) you will find the printing to be far quicker." – user2819245
I am using Epson Advanced Printer Driver, I know I will have to send it as commands to the printer but i don't know how. Because at the moment printer prints out graphics. – zbora23

1 Answers

0
votes

Often when you use printer drivers for dot matrix devices and you are leveraging TTF and other other fonts the device reverts to printing graphics and not text. This will make the device print very slowly. What you want to do is to send raw text along with font selection commands. This will make your application a bit proprietary to that device or devices that speak the same language but will make it much faster.

Personally, for performance, I would create a large string that contained all the commands to do what you need. Font select, print text, cr/lf, select font etc. You would simply look to the Epson documentation to determine the correct sequence to trigger the font you want. Using this methodology you would be using 'printer resident' fonts which will be very fast.