Printing barcode labels from a web page

Question

I am working on an ASP.Net web application that must print dynamically created labels on standard Avery-style label sheets (one particular size, so only one overall layout).

Answer 1

Using SQL Server Reporting Services, I generate a PDF to send to the printer, but it can be seen as HTML on the screen using the control you can include in your web pages. There are RDLC files that are available on the internet to print to various Avery formats.

Answer 2

"precisely" and "printing" aren't two words that really work together that well. I did an OCR/OMR application a year or so ago, and even when building a PDF I saw significant differences between different print drivers and such. Because of that, my gut is to tell you that you might not have 100% success.

If CSS and layout issues don't work that well for you, you might need to resort to building the labels as images using GDI+ -- at least that way you can use GetFontMetrics() and such.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Add a few options to your app that let users adjust spacing for their particular configuration. You could include this right on the label if you want, and style it away via media selectors, but you'll probably want to persist them somewhere, too.

Answer 4

I also struggled with the HTML/CSS approach due to the inconsistent printing behaviour across browsers.

I created a C# library to produce Avery Labels from ASP.NET which I hope you might find useful:

https://github.com/wheelibin/SharpPDFLabel#readme

You can add images and text to the labels, and it's easy to define more labels types.

(I use it for barcode labels, the barcode is generated as an image and then added to the label using this library.)

Cheers

Answer 5

I just went through the same thing. Ended up switching and making a short little JSF app (running on Glassfish) that uses JasperReports to print directly to the lable printer. Push button, instant label at the printer, don't even have to view it on-screen if you don't want to since Jasper can directly output to printer (as well as PDF in browser).

Answer 6

Flash is also good method to push a printable like a label albeit a little more complex to implement and maintain. In most cases it displays much quicker than a PDF and you can embed it into the design of the page and simply add a "Print" button within the flash.

I did this several years ago when we were using HTML and PDF to generate confirmation receipts. HTML is "ok" but is at the mercy of the end users web browser so we quickly dumped that method. PDF's are good as long as they have a PDF reader, which to our surprise a lot of our customers did not. So that was dumped as well after we switched to a FLASH version using a simple flash movie that included a few dynamic text areas and a "print" button. I communicated the data between the page and flash using a few flash vars. You can also use web service.

When I need something more than just simple text I use the free community edition of the PDF Generator component from DynamicPDF.com. It works great and is very quick.