Printing to a USB printer with Python on a Mac

Question

I have a Star TSP600 thermal receipt printer attached to my macbook via usb. The drivers are installed, and I can print to it using the normal Mac print dialog.

How I can construct a program to send text to the printer? Is there a guide to basic printing interfaces? I generally work in Python, and I'd be willing to learn another language if it's appropriate for the task. Just looking for the basic "Hello World" example to get off the ground.

Answer 1

Take a look at the CUPS command line options.

Then you could use popen to send text to the printer.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import popen2
popen2.popen4("lpr -P [printer] " + output_file)