PostScript on a Dymo labelwriter - ghostscript

I'm trying to print a postscript file to a Dymo LabelWriter (tried a LabelWriter 450 and LabelWriter 330-Turbo), i'm getting it trough ok, but the margin seems to be way to high, 1/3 of the label isn't printable (see pic, the black square is supposed to cover the entire label over the width).
The label is 89mm on 39mm (so 252pt x 123pt)
I'm using a boundig box of 8 8 252 123 and the page orientation is set to portrait.
I even tested it with an eps-file generated from Gimp, it leaves the same area blank.
anyone has an idea why it isn't printing correctly?
EDIT:
The file can be viewed here : http://pastebin.com/c7YC5ftb
The command I use to print it on a Dymo LabelWriter is:
C:\ps\gswin32c.exe -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 -dNoCancel -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sOutputFile="%%printer%%DYMO LabelWriter 450" -q "C:\ps\dymo.ps" -c quit

Not without seeing the PostScript file, no. I don't see from the Dymo web site that the printer accepts PostScript input, so how are you sending the PostScript file to it ?
Added in response to edits in the question.
Well its not absolutely clear to me what you expect this to look like.
Your original comment refers to a black square, but the PostScript doesn't contain a black square, it draws a rectangle with an aspect ratio of 20:1. You have set the media up to be wider than it is long (252,123) but you then use the Orientation to rotate the content by 270 degrees. Its true this is portrait, but upside down. If you want portrait why not just set the media to be portrait ?
Simply put the origin is the corner directly above your thumb in the photograph, and I think the long and short sides of the print are reversed with respect to the actual label.
Note that the BoundingBox comment is a comment and is ignored by the PostScript interpreter so changing it has no effect.
Perhaps if you could explain what you are trying to achieve ?

Problem is solved, the printer wasn't set to accept this type of labels
If you ever have this problem go the advanced settings of your printer driver and set the label.

Related

ZEBRA ZT411 bad print size

I have a ZEBRA ZT411 label printer. I had a 203dpi printhead and changed it to 300dpi. I installed the ZT411 300dpi ZPL driver. The printer is now incorrectly calibrating the label. It doesn't push it to the edge so I can tear it off, but it's still tucked inside. It only prints on the bottom of the label. In size 40mm. The size of the label is larger. I've tried everything. Where is the mistake of how this could be changed?
I don't think that's an issue with the label because in that case, you would only have a smaller printout, but no calibration issues.
If you change the printhead with a different resolution, you also need to replace the pulley and the belt because the amount of paper the printer will push when you print a 203 dpi label and a 300 dpi label, is different.
Check here, page 2: you'll see the printhead part number (P1058930-013) which is the one you've used and the conversion kit (P1058930-022) which include the printhead, but also the mentioned pulley and belt, and that's the one you need.

Why does rotating a Code 128 bar code with ZPL make the barcode thicker?

Consider the below ZPL code.
^XA
^BY2,2,80
^FO50,50^BCR^FD3079+Plate-SS-14 # 44^FS
^XZ
Using the online viewer at http://labelary.com/viewer.html shows you vertically rotated bar code with label beneath and everything appears to be fine.
However, when I print the label the bar code is not scan-able because the lines of the bar code are too thick (see below images). Removing the rotate flag from ^BCR and making it ^BC fixes the issue and the lines are perfectly normal and scan-able. I have tried numerous different methods to rotate the code with no success and can't wrap my head around as to why the lines become thicker when rotating a bar code.
Does anyone have any insight as to why this happens?
Broken Rotated Barcode Image
Working (not rotated) Barcode Image
In my case, the solution was the printing speed being too fast. Another potential solution would be to turn down the darkness or temperature of the printer itself if it's an option in the settings.
Simply opening my respective zebra printer's printing preferences showed me a Print Speed setting which was set to 12.7 cm/s. Reducing it down to 10.1 cm/s fixed the problem.
Adjust the Darkness of the printing and/or the speed of the printing. that should solve your problem.
I think it is a problem with your use of the PNG file that the site generates. The PNG file generated includes enough whitespace in the front (top) quiet zone of the symbol to scan, but if you use the Windows system viewer to print the barcode and print in full size, it slices off the top-most bars.
Try embedding the PNG file into a document, setting the photo size to less than full page, or use the PDF file.

How to print halftone from Ghostscript

I have a PostScript file with image and text. I want to print it to a laser printer so that the images print in a halftone round pattern.
I am trying to print it from the command line. I would prefer a PDF output first and then I'll print to the laser printer.
I have an HP Laserjet P2015 printer installed in Windows 10.
gswin64c.exe -dQUIET -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf test.ps -c "<< /HalftoneType 1 /Frequency 37 /Angle 45 /SpotFunction {180 mul cos exch 180 mul cos add 2 div} >> sethalftone"
The PDF file is generated. However, the images does not appear to be in Round Halftone format. I see no change in the image.
This is the original Image
I want the printout to look like this: Required output
For some reason the output is the same as the original.
pdfwrite doesn't create monochrome output, so no, the output won't be halftoned. The whole point of the pdfwrite device is to maintain the output as close in quality as possible to the input.
There is no way to get monochrome output from pdfwrite unless the monochrome is in the input.
If you instead use a monochrome output device (e.g., tiffg3 or tiffg4) you should see a difference, unless the input file (which you haven't supplied) also sets a screen, in which case the last one encountered will take effect. That is, if the PostScript input file specifies a halftone screen, that's the one that will get used.
What you are asking for is what I might generally describe as a hard problem, probably much harder than you expect.
Your best bet is to send the PostScript directly to the printer, since it supports PostScript.
Problem 1; your PostScript file may already contain a halftone in it which overrides the one you want to use. You can usually prevent that by redefining the sethalftone and setscreen operators:
/sethalftone {pop} bind def
/setscreen {pop pop pop} bind def
You do that after you'[ve defined your own halftone, obviously. Or you can just edit the PostScript file and remove the halftone definition, its usually not that hard to find.
Problem 2 is that printer manufacturers sometimes 'tweak' the interpreter to always use their preferred halftone and prevent you overriding it in PostScript. The only way to find out if that's happening is to try a quick test; print a simple image with the default screen, then set a really coarse screen, say 10 lpi and print the same image. If there's no difference then you know that's not a viable option. If there is, then you can just set the screen you want.
Now, if the printer won't let you change the halftone then the only solution is to render the PostScript to an image using Ghostscript (which will let you change the halftone) and then send the resulting image to the printer. You will need to use a 1 bpp device, something like tiffg3 or tiffg4 should work fine.
The problem here is that you need to ensure that the image fits on the media of the printer, because if it doesn't then the likelihood is that the printer will slightly scale down the image so that it does fit, thereby squashing the halftone cells.
Even more subtly, the printable area of the media in the printer may not be the same as the size of the media. Paper handling can mean that there are some areas of the paper that can't be printed on, and the variability in the feeding of the paper can mean that the printer will refuse to print right to the edges anyway. Because if it did, and there was, say, a 1 mm deviation in the paper handling, then 1 mm of the edge would 'fall off' and there would be a 1 mm white gap at the other edge...

Scale PostScript Image via GhostScript

I have a postscript image, which I wanted to scale down to 84x84 pixels.
I tried the following line ( and different ones, but this one is the furthest I got ):
gs -sOutputFile=somefile.bmp -sDEVICE=bmpgray -q -g84x84 -dDEVICEWIDTH=84 -dDEVICEHEIGHT=84 -dPDFFitPage frames/frame_00000055.ps
This did not achieve what I wanted (all it does is showing a white image).
You have several problems with that command line. There is no command line switch -dDEVICEHEIGHT or -dDEVICEWIDTH, the relevant switches are -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS and -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS. You should never attempt to set the media size in two different ways anwyay, it will only lead to problems of some kind. You've specified -dPDFFitPage, but you appear to have supplied a PostScript program as the input.
Unsurprisingly, the PDFFitPage parameter does not scale PostScript.
When you are having problems of any kind, its best not to mute the application using -q (for quiet), in case its trying to tell you something.
Try using -dFitPage instead of -dPDFFitPage. If that still doesn't work, then I'll need to see your PostScript program.
84x84 pixels is tiny, its entirely conceivable that the result of downscaling a PostScript program could result in no pixel centers being touched, in which case the output will indeed be blank.

How can I split an image into multiple files with an action in photoshop?

I use Stamps.com to print shipping labels that are 2.4" wide. Stamps.com unfortunately will only generate a pdf of this size label with 4 labels on the sheet. It is not paginated, and will not print sequentially. Their template assumes you will print it out on an 8.5" x 11" label sheet and peel off from there. Four Label 8.5x`11 sheet
I want to print on a thermal, continuous roll printer which cuts each label out automatically. To have this work I need each label to be one page, and the pdf with four labels split into four cropped files of 2.4" x 8.5". Any ideas?
I have failed so far in making an action in both acrobat, and photoshop. Should I be looking into solving this programmatically outside of photoshop?
I would be inclined to do that with ImageMagick which is installed on most Linux distros and is available for OSX and Windows.
Unfortunately, you haven't provided a sensible sample image, so I'll provide a fake one. I have made the border yellow intentionally so you can see it on StackOverflow's white page layout.
Just at the command line in the Terminal, you would want to set the default density so that when ImageMagick rasterises the image it retains its quality. The [0] refers to the first page of the PDF. Then you would want to trim off the border - whatever colour it is (+/- a small fuzz factor to allow for variations in image encoding) and then tile into 4 equal horizontal strips. So, your command would be:
convert -density 240 stamps.pdf[0] fuzz 20% -trim -crop x4# f-%d.jpg
and you will get 4 files out, called f-0.jpg, f-1.jpg, f-2.jpg and f-3.jpg

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