PDF Label Printing

From PDF docu­ment to printed label

Practical case

The chall­enge is to print precisely prede­fined labels in busi­ness-critical processes. Either for ship­ping with a logi­stics service provider, for warehousing or product regis­tra­tion. The data for the label is trans­mitted as a PDF and, in the best case, should be output directly on a common indus­trial label printer, e.g. from SAP.

Challenges in detail

The labels and tags contain scan­nable codes (e.g. in the form of barcodes), which must be posi­tioned on the label with milli­meter accu­racy, scaled to the respec­tive format without chan­ging the correct propor­tions and printed in high reso­lu­tion. So much for the speci­fi­ca­tions of the service provi­ders or processes.

The PDF templates for the label contain all the rele­vant infor­ma­tion that a “normal” network printer could print out without any problems. But almost all label prin­ters cannot inter­pret PDF. These systems only under­stand their own printer language such as ZPL. Newer label prin­ters are able to print PDF directly. This results in a new invest­ment in hard­ware, although the exis­ting systems would still be usable in terms of sustainability.

It would ther­e­fore be desi­rable to have a solu­tion that is inde­pen­dent of the label prin­ters used and that converts PDF into a printer language such as ZPL without data loss, scaling errors and format limitations.

Solution

The PDF2Label soft­ware from AKI closes precisely this gap. This means that the PDF file is initiated as a print job via SAP, is sent via Prin­Taurus to the PDF2Label module, which prepares the data for the label printer. The advan­tages at a glance
  • Suitable for all PDF formats
  • Exact scaling to the paper size
  • Shif­ting of the coor­di­nate axis possible
  • Support of common indus­trial label printers
  • Usable for all firm­ware versions
  • Imple­men­ta­tion of all reso­lu­tions (DPI)
  • Invest­ment secu­rity, as exis­ting printer models can continue to be used without the need to make compel­ling new purchases

Contact

Tell us if we can support you. Get in touch with us. Without obli­ga­tion and at any time.

For direct enqui­ries you can also contact us by phone: +49 (0)931 32155–0