ZPL - zebra: print justified text block without overwriting last line - zebra-printers

Question

I'm using the following command to print a justified text:
^FB1800,3,0,J^FT100,200^A0B,26,26^FH\^FDLONG TEXT TO BE PRINTED, WHICH DOESNT FIT IN ONLY 3 LINES...^FS
The command ^FB1800,3,0,J prints a field block in a width of 1800 dots, maximum 3 lines, justified.
The problem is that if the text exceeds the maximum number of lines, it overwrites the last line! :( That of course makes the text of the last line unreadable.
How can I avoid that? Does anybody know if is there a way to cut the exceeding text?
The documentation says exactly that this happens:
Text exceeding the maximum number of lines overwrites the last line. Changing the font size automatically increases or decreases the size of the block.
For reference: I'm using printer Zebra 220Xi4.
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Take a look at the ^TB command. It is preferred over the ^FB command and truncates if the text exceeds the size defined in the TB params

Answer 2

I had just about the same problem, what fixed it in my case - although not the most elegant way - is to specify a higher number of maximum lines, and then formatting it in a way that only the first 3 are in the visible area.
In your case it would be for example ^FB1800,7,0,J instead of ^FB1800,3,0,J
This at least fixed it for me right away, because I print this text at the bottom of the label. If you need to have it somewhere in the middle or top, there might be some tricks with putting a (white) box on top of the overflow-area, since the Zebra printers seem to render before printing. Hope it helps.

Answer 3

Depending on the higher-level programming language you're using (assuming that you are), you could accomplish the same thing (truncate the text to be printed to a specified number of characters) with code like this (C# shown here):
public void PrintLabel(string price, string description, string barcode)
{
const int MAX_CAPS_DESC_LEN = 21;
const int MAX_LOWERCASE_DESC_LEN = 32;
try
{
bool descAllUpper = HHSUtils.IsAllUpper(description);
if (descAllUpper)
{
if (description.Length > MAX_CAPS_DESC_LEN)
{
description = description.Substring(0, MAX_CAPS_DESC_LEN);
}
}
else // not all upper
{
if (description.Length > MAX_LOWERCASE_DESC_LEN)
{
description = description.Substring(0, MAX_LOWERCASE_DESC_LEN);
}
}
. . .
This is what I'm using; is there any reason to prefer the "raw" ^TB command over this?