Re: dot matrix printing labels

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 10:29:00AM +0100, Thomas Halahan wrote:
| 
| Hi,
| 
| I'm looking into printing labels from a roll of labels one 
| label wide on a dot-matrix printer from a debian box. I 
| don't want to print a whole page of them at once, only one 
| at a time - depending on when the stock comes in.
| 
| Does anyone know how this incremental print could be done.  
| A label is about 5cm by 3cm.

I imagine you only want to print plain text, right?  Is this a
single-sheet fed printer, or is it continuous feed?  My response is
based on continuous feed.

So you could measure how many lines of text there are on a given
label, and how many are between the start of consecutive labels.

Then you can print the data out with the proper number of blank lines
to feed the paper.  Of course, this only works if the spacing of the
labels is an exact mutlitple of the size of a line, or you adjust the
spacing output periodically to correct.  I don't know if you can make
any of the spooling software not send an "eject page" signal to the
printer, but if not then simply cat or echo the data out /dev/lp[n]
and it should work.

HTH,
-D