Output to a Receipt Printer

Hello,

I need to print to a receipt printer. Very basic stuff, nothing fancy. Is there a general driver that can be loaded to use these printers or I have to load printer specific drivers. Can I output the WD report output to a receipt printer or I need to use low-level output (escape commands).

Would be grateful for any assistance especially from POS experts.

Thanks and regards

issah

In this cases you normally use only a few escape sequences(bold,underline...), fopen/fwrite is enough.
You don't have to worry about drivers and so.

Issah,
I'm using the report editor to do this. Works great. You have to bear in mind that you need to use only those fonts, supported by the printer you use. Otherwise printing is slow.
(tip: set this printer as your default windows printer, then you see the printers internal fonts listed under windows,. i.e.: Word, Excel AND Windev).
With the "User report&querys" option it gives you the opportunity to change reports on the fly, according to the clients needs. I.e. change logo, suppress price or add a nice footer.

Note: I had several problems using timers in my window AND print a report at the same time. In the end I decided to use a stand-alone mini-print-server (executable) which is just waiting and get signalled by my main-app via SendMessage(). Then it print one report and starts waiting again.

All this is working now on numereous sites more than a year now. Without any problem: 24x7.

Another way is to to use ESC codes. I believe others are doing it this way. Maybe they can share their experience.

A third option is to use OPOS-drivers. You can compare these with printer-drivers, used for all kinds of POS-equipment (printers, cash drawer, customer line displays and so on). This way you can implement printing or opening a cash-drawer by implementing a generic OPOS-command. The different drivers, supplied by the manufacturer of your equipment, are handling the hardware specific things.
In about a month or 2 I can give you more info, because I have to use this myself, next year.

Hi Issah / Arie,

What do you need to know?

This is the way that we talk to the printer, cash draw, customer display etc. We use the com ports and use the epson ESC commands.

We have been doing it this way for about 10 years (5 with windev).

I am having some days over christmas but I should be about.

Mike Allison

Hi,

Although it turned out that I had problems with the configuration of my COM port via a docking station, one of Mike's previous posts helped me a lot in this area:

[forum.mysnip.de]

HTH...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/22/2009 06:34PM by Jimbo.

Thanks to all for the leads. Will keep you informed with my experiences.

Regards

issah