Sunday 26 March 2017

Printing ZPL and EPL files on a Mac

Anyone who has tried to print ZPL or EPL files from a website on a Mac before knows what a pain this can be.

For example Amazon will supply a ZPL file for their FBA item labels. On Windows this file will be sent direct to the printer without a problem. Unfortunately on MacOS ZPL and EPL files cannot be handled by the print system so instead the file is downloaded.

There have been many workarounds for this most of them requiring complex commands in the terminal or manually dragging the files to an app that will send them to the printer.

Another workaround is to use Java on the website to send the file to the printer but this must now (since October 2012 when Apple removed it from the OS for security reasons) be downloaded and installed manually and must be given the appropriate security permissions to run within your web browser. To us this approach seemed cumbersome, complicated and not very secure and is completely dependent on the website supporting printing via Java.

Enter DropPrint our solution to printing ZPL and EPL files on a Mac.
DropPrint is a small application which sits in the dock.

When first opening DropPrint you will want to set the settings to your liking.
Print ZPL and EPL files on Mac OS

The Printer settings on DropPrint allow you to select the printer you wish to send the ZPL or EPL files to or select the "Ask On Print" option to have DropPrint ask which printer to print to when it receives a ZPL Or EPL file.

Once a printer is selected you can begin printing by simply dropping a ZPL or EPL file onto the application window or dock icon.

Print ZPL and EPL files on Mac OS
Another option on the printer settings tab is "Show Notifications" this option as the title reveals will show a notification when a single or group of ZPL or EPL files are sent to the printer.
Print ZPL and EPL files on Mac OS

The unique and most useful feature of our DropPrint application is the ability to watch a selected folder for new ZPL and EPL files and automatically send them to the selected printer. To enable this simply navigate to the Watch Folder tab, check the checkbox to enable watching a folder and click the "Set Location" button to choose the folder to watch for new ZPL and EPL files.

Print ZPL and EPL files on Mac OS

The other settings on the watch folder tab allow you to choose what to do with the ZPL or EPL file after it is sent to the printer. You can choose to either Delete or Move the file once printed, setting the location to move to if required.

The final option allows you to choose whether to apply the move/delete option to files which are dropped onto the application as well as ones which are automatically printed from the watched folder.


DropPrint is a free extra application which comes with our Thermal Printer Driver for Mac which can be found


Here


You can find DropPrint in the extras folder on the Thermal Driver dmg file after purchase.

1 comment :

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