Print to a UPS / Fedex Thermal printer?

Question

I have a client asking if their web application (PHP) can easily print to a UPS / Fedex thermal label printer.

So for instance, I can get back a PDF from UPS/Fedex with the shipping label. I just need to print that.

Does anyone know if you can print directly to these printers or, if not, if there's another way to do it?

EDIT: To clarify, all I want to accomplish is to be able to print to these printers, without having to make my client ALT-TAB to some third-party application like UPS Worldship or ShipRush or QuickBooks Shipping Manager and clicking 'Print' within that application. Do-able?

Answer 1

I used to work on UPS shipping systems and yes you can print using the thermal printers. You need the correct drivers installed to do this. Depending how you want to print will also determine how you need to install the printer (local or shared printer). HTH

Answer 2

Getting the labels in correct format

The FedEx & UPS APIs provide options to get thermal label specific types. You will beat your head on the keyboard trying to get PDFs to print properly on thermal printers.

Some common thermal types EPL/EPL2, ZPL/ZPLII. Most thermal printers will accept documents matching one of these types.

For Fedex something like this in your ShipRequest - This is using the FedEx WSDL for shipping.

RequestedShipment.LabelSpecification.ImageType = FedExShipService.LabelSpecificationImageType.ZPLII

And UPS - Building XML to post to the UPS service.

<LabelSpecification>
 <LabelPrintMethod>
  EPL2
 </LabelPrintMethod>
</LabelSpecification>

Printing the labels

You will need to essentially send "raw" data to the printer. I started with this article and adopted it to my solution. FedEx for example returns a byte array which contains the label information - I convert this to a string and then send to the printer.

'Convert from Byte Array to String
Dim enc As System.Text.ASCIIEncoding = New System.Text.ASCIIEncoding()
Dim strConverter As String = enc.GetString(<ByteArrayFromFedEx>)

http://www.paulaspinall.com/post/2008/05/31/Sending-data-direct-to-a-printer.aspx

There is also another thread on SO about this topic.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/123154/sending-raw-data-to-fedex-label-printer

Answer 3

Shiprush has an api you can use to generate labels from code. It is pretty flexible, and can either send the label to a printer or return the label to your code for you to handle.