Sunday, September 14, 2014

Prof of concept, EPL labels on AmigaOS.

Well I felt like writing something about some working I have been doing lately.

For now I'm not going to say anything about MPlayer, all I can say is that there has been some improvements.



You might have seen my Barcode application on AmigaWorld.net, well I was nostalgic about EPL & ZPL printers, but don't have a printer my self so need a application to display labels, I know there are label design tools for PC, but what is the fun in using some thing some one else has created? Besides I was also wondering about how to generate bar-codes, I often created reports for PSI and Consafe logistics, but this was not my primary role, so I did not have time to find out how to generate bar-codes, at time I did some googling and found only barcode fonts, well they are nice in word document’s and so on, but then you need to generate a word document or excel file, its a lot easier to generate CSV files and Pictures, and its pity easy to lay out rapports in HTML.

If I did have more time to play with it back then might have done some thing, but as I was saying, I did not. as it happens now I did have the time for it, first ting I did was Google and found out how to generate code39 and then I Googled and found out how to generate code128.

Barcode39 is only numbers and uppercase alphabet.
Barcode128 is upper/lower alphabet, and also the ability to compress numbers.

 I also found some information about bar-code 2 of 5, this Barcode only supports number from 0 to 9, and also as the name imply 2 are wide and 3 as narrow lines

I know this is geeky stuff, but some times geeky stuff is useful

Almost all postal and logistic company's tag packages so they can easy lookup who the package belongs to and where it is. Also at the cash register at the local grocery store, use barcode to register what they sell. At service department in PSI and Consafe Logistics (Capbit/Captura) they used bar code to track service on defect products that has been sent for repair.

So every company small or large company's use barcodes in one way or the other.

And this is way this is interesting, if you thinking about starting your own company or if you work for some company I'm sure your in contact with barcodes.

Only basic EPL commands are supported, but program can easily to be extended to support more commands, this is just a prof of concept.

And also while I can generate the label I can't print it, find desktop printers that work with AmigaOS tricky.

If you like to buy a Label printer and use it on AmigaOS, I can inform you that they should work, as long you use ZPL or EPL program language.

You can also find documents for EPSON label printers, but they are more tricky, you see they use ESC codes, and HEX values so not so easy.

Datamax Compact 4 I don't know anything intersecting about it sorry, I know they are good quality but do not know any thing about language they support.

Some of the Intermec printers supports the EPL language this I know.

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