This article is relevant if you are seeking to hook up and print from the Zebra line of Desktop and Industrial digital printers.
Background
During a NetSuite manufacturing implementation for a client who is a United States Federal Drug Administration based Class III medical device manufacturer, we led the creation of finished goods box labels and the creation of work order travelers on their production floor. Because of the high demand for reliable outputs on the production floor, the client sought the use of Zebra Printer technologies.
We leverage our Content Renderer Engine (CRE) tool to allow us to get control over the mechanism to reach “hard to reach” data in NetSuite. Pushing the boundaries of what you think you can do with NetSuite’s Advanced PDF/HTML tools, we were enthusiastic to challenge CRE to work with the Zebra Printers.
In this case, we developed a custom Lot tracking system to handle the control of all the manufacturing products. From the custom lot record, we had the opportunity to create labels of all sorts — labels such as lot information, quarantine, quality control attributes, product labels, and shipping carton labels. The Content Renderer Engine especially excels at hopping on to multiple records via linked saved searches to get to NetSuite held data that otherwise might be exceedingly difficult to reach.
Zebra Printer Language Option
Knowing that the Zebra Printer has its own printer language, variants such as ZPL, EPL, and CPCL, we thought we may need to prepare for generating the necessary printer instruction information to drive the desired printed outputs. A review of the ZPL language syntax looked straightforward: a complete human-readable command set is available to us. That’s simple for our CRE tool.
However, since we are experts at using NetSuite’s provided BFO framework (the technology behind the generation of PDFs used in NetSuite’s Advanced PDF/HTML generation), we decided to see if we can indeed just “print to the Zebra” like we might to any other general printer. The good news is that we succeeded! Here is a link to sample output.
How to Setup Zebra Printing for NetSuite Driven Outputs
Mike I. is our resident expert for generating great looking branded NetSuite outputs. Mike went to work on the challenge. He started with a Zebra GX420d printer and explored the options. The desired width x height label output was 4 x 6. Mike recognized that he would need to rotate the content so that it would output in landscape mode. The BFO syntax has a method of rotating output — yet the attempts to do this did not give Mike the control that he desired.
Mike looked deeper into the printer options supplied by the print driver itself. With some trial-and-error, Mike was able to determine that he could rotate the printed output without having to change any of the generated content itself. We were very pleased to see that the results came forth! See related images here.
Get Control Over Your Demanding NetSuite Printed Outputs
While we did not actually test the generation of Zebra Printer Language codes, we were prepared to go there. We were able to use more conventional techniques which should be accessible to the general NetSuite Administrator. The good news is that we had complete control over our NetSuite outputs and Zebra’s printer driver implementation made it simple for us.
We give our Content Renderer Engine to all of our clients free of license charge. It’s one of the ways we add value to our engagement relationship.
If you found this article helpful, feel free to get notified of new articles. If you have a challenging NetSuite printed output concern, let’s have a conversation.
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Marty Zigman
Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.
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Another option could be using Zebra XML enabled Printers and push label output as xml which will be converted by Zebra printer. Zebra printer will use Label format on the printer to print Labels
–Pankaj
Thank you Pankaj for the suggestion.
Marty
Netsuite generates an EPL2 file for my our shipping labels, and being that the label automatically prints on entry, you are unable to change settings for its print style.
We have the exact same printer you have pictured. When we print UPS labels to an EPL2 on Zebra, it shrinks the graphics size down to half of the label, overlapping barcodes and addresses. Even when set to the correct label roll size (it senses the roll fine, and can print full label size out of any program BUT Netsuite integration).
Have you experienced this? We are attempting to upgrade from an older Zebra that prints the EPL2 files perfectly. There are no settings for Netsuite to adjust the size of the print.
Hello Matthew,
We are currently solving this by generating an EPL2 file from NetSuite using our Content Renderer Engine (CRE) tool. See https://blog.prolecto.com/2015/12/19/video-how-to-extend-advanced-pdfs-with-content-renderer-engine for a general understanding of our license-free tool. I plan to write a follow-up article on this as there are challenges getting image based barcodes to be readable on small Zebra labels.
Marty