PDF Label Printing

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.