Firstly, please insure you have installed the printer driver from your manufacturer for your bar code printer and that you can do a test print.   If you have not loaded the 4 x 6 inch label stock, please ensure you do this first.

 

For Windows, the best way to communicate to the printer is by sharing the printer.  Make sure you use only 8 letters in the share name for backwards compatibility with older versions of the Windows operating systems.  

 

print_to_barcode_printer_windows

 

By sharing the printer, it does not matter if the printer is a connected via parallel, serial, USB or a TCP/IP port.

 

Now we are ready to either directly print to the printer using the Print button as follows:

 

print_to_barcode_printer1

 

Now, we need to setup on Ports tab where to send the Zebra ZPL II print job.  For Windows, this is the printer's share name \\<computername>\ZebraR11 in our case, where <computername> is needs to be replaced with the name of the computer sharing out the printer and you can not use \\.\ZebraR11 as it will not work.  

 

print_to_barcode_printer2

 

At this point, you can press the OK button and then press the OK button on the Print Label1 dialog.  Your label should start printing.

 

Alternatively, you can setup a printer associated with the label, that when we press the Run button it will automatically print to the bar code printer with the saved configuration as follows:

 

print_to_barcode_printer3

 

Expand the the Label1 node so you can see the Print To node, then right-click and from the menu select Add Printer or double-click the Print To node to automatically do an Add Printer action.  This will open the Label1 - Add Printer dialog as show above.  From this dialog, open the Printer Name field selection box and select PEERNET Zebra Thermal Printer.  Now press the Options button, to open the Zebra Thermal Printer Settings dialog.  On the Graphics tab, you need to setup the resolution of your printer, for our example the bar code printer is 300 DPI (12 dots per millimeter).  Normally, the only other tab we need to configure is the Ports tab, which defines where the generated ZPL II print job is to be sent.   In this example, we need to set to do the following:

 

print_to_barcode_printer4

 

After this, just press the OK button, to close the Zebra Thermal Printer Settings dialog, and then press the OK button on the Label1 - Add Printer dialog.  You will see a printer has been created on the Print To node.

 

print_to_barcode_printer5

 

 

To change the options on the printer, you can right-click the printer to bring up a menu of operations and select Properties or double-click the printer.

 

Now select the Label1 in the Project Pane and press the Run button, it will display the Run Label1 dialog, which allows you to select which printers to print this label to.   You can define as many Print To nodes as required, and the Run command will allow you to select which printers to print the labels on.

 

print_to_barcode_printer6

 

Press the OK button on the Run Label1 dialog, to print the label on the bar code printer.

 

The advantage of defining the Print To, is the configuration information for the printers is stored with the label and you only need to use the Run command to produce the labels on the target printers.