[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Spine Label Printers?

[Jason Etheridge]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Joe Atzberger
<jatzberger at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure about your library's situation, but if they are going to print
> in large volumes, you should also consider a laser printer.

Printing to "sheet labels" is currently a weak area with Evergreen.
Right now what you do is define a "form" in Windows and some
character-based dimensions in the staff client, and the client will
send a form feed after each label to advance to the next form.  If the
printer can be made aware of the sheet's layout (i.e. 3 labels by 10
labels) and handle the form feeds for us, then we're golden, but
though I thought I saw an example of that once, I may have saw the HP
Universal Printer driver instead with its print N number of pages per
sheet feature, which would only be good for 16 labels or so.

Of course, batch printing is more amenable to other processes, however
cumbersome.  One site is using Evergreen to print to a PDF file, which
they then upload to a web page which munges it into a layout suitable
for sheet printing.  Similarly, the spine label preview can be
copy/pasted into other applications, and it's even possible to match
the format needed for OCLC's LabelMe program.

You could also get at the data directly through reporting or API calls
and use another application to do the printing.

I'd love to hear how folks are handling this.  Would love even more to
see resources put toward improving the situation. :)

Joe, does Koha have any code that would be worth leveraging for this?

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Tactical Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com

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