SPUG: Perl, the web, and receipt printers?

Kirby Krueger (SPUG) kirbyk+spug at gmail.com
Thu Feb 5 16:05:12 PST 2009


Does anyone have any experience with receipt printers?  And in particular
using them from a web application?

My web foo is utterly failing me.  Everyone wants to sell you a complete
Point of Sale System.  I found Epson's documentation, but it was nearly a
thousand pages and was ... not as clear as one would expect a bloated,
thousand page document to be.

What I really want to know is:

* Are these just printers with a very strange printer size?  And as such, I
can just very carefully format a web page and tell javascript to load the
window in the background, print, and close it, and call it good?

OR

* Are these strange devices that require some sort of specialized software
or middleware?  And if so, are there any that someone's written a Perl
module to interface with?

And if anyone has experience with a particular model, that'd be interesting
(to me) too.  (Well, not really, I can't imagine a circumstance where
receipt printers would actually be interesting.)

Sorry to go slightly astray from basic perl questions.  Sometimes in life,
non-technical people seem to get the idea that the person who knows some
technical thing is instantly an expert on all technical things and ask
questions that you don't even have the basic framework of understanding to
answer, and they need to know how you'll get it done, like, now. :/  I'm
pretty sure the answer is "It's easy, just get one and I'll have it working
in half a day" or "Forget it, it'll take a month of development time to get
it working", but I can't for the life of me figure out which one of those it
is.

Thanks for any help!

-- Kirby
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