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Printing Modes
There are two fundamental printing modes with mobile printers.
A. ASCII Based Print Jobs
The host sends the print job as a series of lines of characters, some of which represent the
text to be printed, while other portions are command codes which tell the printer which font
to use, where to locate the text, what barcodes to use, etc. These text-based files are
encoded in a print language specific to the target printer.
The FP530si understands ASCII based jobs in several different print languages. Refer to
the
Appendix
or the
Integrator’s Guide
for the list of print languages supported.
B. Graphic Based Print Jobs
The host assembles the printed image as a series of lines of dots, and transmits this image
as a sequence of data bytes that represent the dot patterns assembled. Often these jobs or
files have some control characters on the front end and / or rear end of the dot pattern bytes
to define their format, help control pagination, etc.
Windows drivers in particular encode the image as a graphic based print job before it is
passed along to the printer.
In addition to accepting graphic jobs from its Windows driver, the FP530si can accept and
print directly many other graphic image file types. This opens up the option to print job
images from a variety of devices for which drivers or print utilities don’t exist, such as some
tablets and smartphones.
Please see the
Integrator’s Guide
or your system integrator for more details.
