Squadgy - a few points
on investigation I have found that not all LP2824's have cutters - the one I originally linked to did not. I have changed the link to one that does - slightly more expensive.
You are probably going to have difficulty sourcing correct diameter rolls of flight strip paper. I haven't been able to locate any on-line (although I have found tens of RFQ's from various aviation authorities)!
Be aware that some coated direct thermal paper is not easy to write on with ball-point pens. I would recommend that when you find a source, that you request some samples to test.
You could maybe get away with buying larger rolls (from the site posted previously) and rewinding onto different spools. If you use an approx 50mm dia spool you should get about 150m of strip on it ~ 750 strips, however I expect that when you get to the end of a roll there will be significant 'curl'.
I have installed the Zebra driver. The preview from excel shows exactly what appears on the screen. I have sent the print stream to a file - the contents of the file is what Zebra call ZLP script. From the generated script I can see that the driver rasterises the print area into a bitmap image, which it sends to the printer to print.
However what is quite interesting is how simple the ZLP script language is - it is basically a series of ascii strings specifying where to position an element eg: line, text string etc.
These strings -
Code:
^XA
^MNC
^MMC
^PW200
^LL1600
^FO0,1322^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO0,1112^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO100,1112^GB0,210,2^FS
^FO0,922^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO0,822^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO0,722^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO0,622^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO0,522^GB200,0,2^FS
^FO100,522^GB0,400,2^FS
^FO0,322^GB200,0,2^FS
^FT60,1565^A0B,35,35^FDFld_1^FS
^FT60,1407^A0B,28,28^FDFld_2^FS
^FT165,1407^A0B,28,28^FDFld_3^FS
^XZ
produces a 25mm x 200mm print out that looks like this -
It would be very simple to write a
VB script to generate the strings and may be more convenient than using excel.
Please post your progress!
