I'm trying to print images on a Zebra printer using ZPL commands.
This is the code:
^XA
^FO10,10^XGR:ICONE.GRF,3,3^FS
^XZ
My problem is that I can't print image from the Flash Memory. I only get image printed from DRAM memory. Could some one give me some tips?
Your ZPL sample relies on the printer having been pre-configured correctly by uploading the image to the printer memory (at the printer memory path R:ICONE.GRF). This is a little more brittle than just embedding the image directly in the ZPL, as you have found out.
If you're always embedding the same image (which appears to be the case), and if you're not worried about shaving milliseconds off of your print latency (most people aren't), then I'd recommend embedding the image directly in your ZPL using the ^GF command.
There's a little bit of black magic involved in getting the ^GF command right, but it's pretty easy if you have ZebraDesigner installed or if you just use Labelary to add the image to your label ZPL template.
Why don´t you create a memory bitmap loading the image from E: into it and printing from this memory image? You could do something like:
Dim image1 As Bitmap = CType(Image.FromFile("E:\ImageFile.bmp", True), Bitmap)
You may also put a PictureBox in your form, load the image into it and call your Zebra code on that control - it´s in memory too.
I just figured out my stupid error in the code:
^FO10,10^XGR:ICONE.GRF,3,3^FS
The solution was simply change de "R" by "E":
^FO10,10^XGE:ICONE.GRF,3,3^FS
Thanks for the ansswers.
Related
I want to create a visualization of a matrix for some academic work. I decided to go about this by having the pixels in the image correspond to the values in the matrix. I created the nice small png that follows:
When properly scaled up, you get a very reasonable image:
This is a screenshot from within inkscape. However, when export this as a pdf, both evince and chrome do a terrible job at upscaling what should be very trivial, and instead I get something that looks like:
The pdf itself seems to scale appropriately well for printing, but unfortunately I do a lot of my editing without printing, and this looks unacceptable. I did find this incredibly old thread about people seeming to have a similar issue with chrome's pdf viewer, and the "solution" was to just upscale the raster graphics. This is a solution, but is terribly inefficient.
Is anyone aware of a way to change the pdf so that it gets upscaled appropriately? Maybe a config change in evince or chrome that will render these properly? Even a nice way to go from a raster image to a vector image might be suitable?
The comments aggregated into an answer...
An image dictionary in a PDF has an (optional) boolean entry Interpolate. It is specified as a flag indicating whether image interpolation shall be performed by a conforming reader.
The program used by the OP to create the PDF, Inkscape, seems to have explicitly set this flag to true. Editing the PDF to unset this flag creates a file which looks as desired by the OP.
(This also is a solution proposed in this Inkscape forum thread eventually found by the OP, which is to save the PDF with high-resolution bitmaps embedded. File -> Inkscape Preferences -> Bitmaps -> Resolution for Create Bitmap Copy, and set it to 6000 dpi)
The fact that interpolation looks different in different viewers and different output media, is by design. The PDF specification states on interpolation:
A conforming Reader may choose to not implement this feature of PDF, or may use any specific implementation of interpolation that it wishes.
A different way to get around this problem (especially as some PDF viewers have the tendency to not really live up to the specification and e.g. interpolate ignoring that flag) would be to use vector graphics here, drawing the bitmap pixels as rectangles. The result should be optimal.
Does anyone know if we can resize a QR-Code easily by using a proper vector program OR, is the size information contained on that code, hence, we will not be able to resize without changing the code ?
Thanks in advance.
You can resize as much as you want. The information is encoded in the pattern of the data, not in the size of the dots themselves. As long as a scanner can resolve properly between light/dark, the QR code should be readable at any size.
Update 2016: If someone happens to need to upscale a QR code image in some sort of browser/webview - you might get away with a simple CSS property:
img {
image-rendering: pixelated;
}
This way the upscaled image stays sharp.
See a comparison here: http://codepen.io/erkkit/pen/GodxGX
For high resolution (vector image) QR code for printing/publishing:
Get your free QR code
Right-click-and-save OR PrintScreen the QR code
Open/insert it in Photoshop, crop the QR code, and save as *.psd file (default Photoshop format)
Open that *.psd file with Adobe Illustrator – and you get the vector QR code. DONE! :)
Don't just re-size it that will make the edges blurry. You want it to have hard edges like MS-paint or the pencil brush in Photoshop. Open the file in Photoshop and go to IMAGE - RE-SIZE IMAGE and make sure Nearest Neighbor is selecting from the bottom drop down menu before you click OK
You CAN'T, not with the free QR generators. Unless you do some Adobe Illustrator tweaks with Live Trace/Paint afterwards. The abundant free QR generators are a joke when it comes to publishing the QR code you need. Resizing an originally low resolution image (the previous comment) for publishing/printing purposes is the most rediculous statement I've seen in a while. The guy doesn't know what he is talking about.
I have a program that generates a PDF as output. If I send this file to a printer using the Adobe viewer, it prints exactly as wanted. In particular, the application is printing labels and there's a requirement that every last pixel on the page is used, i.e. no margins whatsoever.
I'd like to try and automate this process. GhostScript seemed a logical choice. I used the command lines
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=psmono -sOutputFile=A4_300.xxx -sPAPERSIZE=a4 A4_Print.pdf
... or alternatively
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=ljetplus -sOutputFile=A4_300.xxx -sPAPERSIZE=a4 A4_Print.pdf
I can send the output file, A4_300.xxx, to the printer via LPR and it almost prints well, but there's about 6-8 mm missing on all sides, i.e. there's a margin being enforced, and the text that should be printing in that area is actually being cut off.
Paper size should be a4, and that much is working correctly. But how can I arrange for the output to fill the whole page?
The output device is "some kind of HP laser printer"; I haven't seen the physical device. A similar printer I tested with was able to process output both for "psmono" (that produced PostScript) and "ljetplus" (binary, but printable).
Any advice, please?
First of all: are you sure that your printer is physically able to print edge-to-edge? Which printer model is it?
It may well be that the printer itself enforces the "missing 6-8 mm on all sides". Since you see the margin "area actually being cut off", it means the printer indeed receives the complete image, but it crops the image to what appears as *ImageableArea keywords in PostScript printer PPDs (PS Printer Description files).
If your printer supports edge-to-edge printing indeed, then you may need to enable it as a default...
...by some semi-secret setting in the front panel menu (if your printer has s.th. like that), or...
...by accessing the web-based printer configuration panel from your computer's browser (should your printer support that), or...
...by logging into the printer via telnet, rsh, ssh or msh (depending on your printer to allow this).
The actual procedure to set this depends on your printer model. It should be described in the printer manual.
If you are unlucky, the device simply doesn't support borderless printing. Then buy or find a model that does what you want ;-)
Update: I had missed your statement "If I send this file to a printer using the Adobe viewer, it prints exactly as wanted." From this I conclude that your printer must indeed be supporting borderless printing.
If your LPR client uses any form of PPD (as is the case if you print via CUPS, f.e.), then check out my hints about modifying PPDs (which also works for Windows systems) here:
"What lpr arguments do I need to print a 1400x800 pixel image on a 4x6 label?"
"What's the easiest way to add custom page sizes to a PPD?"
Most likely you do not need to finetune your Ghostscript output; it is fine as the cropped printouts show.
Most likely you need to tweak your LPR client so that its "driver" does not destroy what you want to send to the printer.
I generate a figure in MATLAB with large amount of elements (100000+) and want to save it into a PDF file. With zbuffer or painters renderer I've got very large and slowly opened file (over 4 Mb) - all points are in vector format. Using OpenGL renderer rasterize the figure in PDF, ok for the plot, but not good for text labels. The file size is about 150 Kb.
Try this simplified code, for example:
x=linspace(1,10,100000);
y=sin(x)+randn(size(x));
plot(x,y,'.')
set(gcf,'Renderer','zbuffer')
print -dpdf -r300 testpdf_zb
set(gcf,'Renderer','painters')
print -dpdf -r300 testpdf_pa
set(gcf,'Renderer','opengl')
print -dpdf -r300 testpdf_op
The actual figure is much more complex with several axes and different types of plots.
Is there a way to rasterize the figure, but keep text labels as vectors?
Another problem with OpenGL is that is does not work in terminal mode (-nosplash -nodesktop -nodisplay) under Mac OSX. Looks like OpenGL is not supported. I have to use terminal mode for automation. The MATLAB version I run is 2007b. Mac OSX server 10.4.
This is a funny one. Your problem is not Matlab, it's Ghostscript (Matlab creates PDFs by calling Ghostscript, at least on Windows). When I run
x=linspace(1,10,100000);
y=sin(x)+randn(size(x));
plot(x,y,'.')
print -dpsc2 test.ps
I've got a 2Mb PS file (all vector, of course), which when compressed became a 164Kb ZIP. One would expect to get more-or-less the same result when converting PS to PDF, but ps2pdf test.ps produced your 4Mb file!
Since you are on a Mac, you probably have Distiller. I'd give it a try — generate PS files as above, and then run them through Distiller; you should get a 150K vector PDF.
If you insist on rasterizing, I can suggest printing the figure without any axes or labels to a tiff, opening the tiff, and recreating axes and labels on top of it.
If you don't want to go with a 2D histogram (i.e. an image where pixel brightness corresponds to density of points) as BlessedKey suggests, it looks like the only good way is to do the rasterizing yourself, as mentioned by AB.
getframe followed by frame2im seems to be the way to go for that. Unfortunately, getframe returns empty if you run with -nodisplay. Therefore, you'd have to save the figure as .fig, and on another computer run a script that
opens the figure, gets the content of the axes with getframe, displays the image from getframe and then saves to pdf.
As an alternative to simple plotting or a 2D histogram, you may want to look into scattercloud, which combines plotting the points with density information, by the way.
If at all possible you should try to subsample your problem before building the illustration. If you are plotting points on a curve then 10,000 is probably more than you need. A modern printer is only about 600 DPI afterall.
If the points are illustrating a cloud with some density properties, a better solution may be to build a two dimensional histogram first, and illustrate that with imshow or imagesc.
If multiple clouds are being illustrated with different colors you may be interested in building one such image for each cloud and the combining them with transparency.
I'm creating a program to generate PDF files in VB.Net.
Everything is working fine except that the image is being displayed with a blue background while the image provided doesn't have any.
Following are the lines of code being used:
sColor = IIf(mvarEncodeASCII85, ToASCII85(ImgColor),
(System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetString(ImgColor)))
What am I doing wrong?
There is not alot of details, but my first thougt is that it is .png-files or .gif-files.
Am I correct? In that case it may be an issue with adobe acrobat handling the transparent backgrounds.
As I said it's hard to say exactly without any further details.