I have connected the USB printer for windows xp and windows 7 without printer driver, It connects properly, by using the win32 API we can open port and communicate with it. Que- Now I wanted to connect USB printer to Win CE device, Win CE device gives error of install the Printer driver. How I can handle the this to connect the printer and to communicate with it.
How windows dll will work on win CE.?
If the printer's usb support is a simple printer class, Microsoft's parallel cable replacement driver should work fine 'usbprn.dll'. This driver will instantiate a stream driver 'LPT1:' or 'LPTn:' which you can open with CreateFile() and use WriteFile() to send data to the printer.
You can get access to the simulated parallel states (paperout, etc) via simple IOCTL calls.
Some label printers (Zebra/Cognitive/etc) have their own proprietary control languages which you will need to get technical documentation for.
For other printers you have PCL or reverse engineer using open-source code.
Which specific printer are you trying to get working?
You cannot use the desktop driver in CE - you need a driver built specifically for CE.
First, try adding the USB PCL Printer driver from the Platform Builder catalog to your CE OS image and see if that works. It works on a fair number of printers.
If it doesn't work, then see if the printer OEM has a Windows CE specific driver.
