Printing Invoices

[Deadly_Bait]

I've gone through every post I could find and have found 3 solutions,
but none of them are working for me.

The situation:
My app will be used by field technicians to print service invoices out
in the field. They will be printing to HP printers via IrDA.

The problem is that I can't format and print my invoices.

The first solution I found was FieldSoftware's PrinterCE tool, but my
employer is a small pest control business and can't afford to buy this
for me. It would work perfectly, as I could format the invoices
properly, but it's not an option for me.

The second solution I read about was creating an HTML document and
somehow printing that. This would be great if someone could explain
to me how I could print an HTML file. I found the HP Mobile Printer
SDK, but it doesn't support printing HTML files. It only supports a
handful of text/picture files and I don't know if I could even convert
my HTML file to a format that the printer SDK could even use. Any
ideas on this?

The third solutions seems to be using PInvoke. I've never used it
before, but I poked around have a general idea of how it works. It
sounds like I'm supposed to use some methods in coredll.dll, but I
can't figure out which ones. I can't even figure out what methods are
in that file. Someone mentioned "dumpbin /all coredll.dll", but when
I ran that I got an error that said I was missing mspdb71.dll, which
Google knows nothing about. Is there a site somewhere that lists the
members I could PInvoke in that file? Is that the file I'm even
supposed to be using?

Any help would be much appreciated. I've been spinning my wheels for
several days now, going through forums and websites.

Thanks in advance,
Deadly_Bait

 

[John Kuczynski]

Deadly_Bait,

If you mostly just need to print text, lines, boxes, etc, you could
generate the PCL data, and only use the HP toolkit to get the codes to
the printer via IR. I have some snippets available to get you started
if you want to explore this direction.

I was developing a printer drawing toolset that generated the PCL and
work hand in hand with the HP SDK, but it's been "sitting on the shelf"
because of the difficulty I was having figuring out how to get images
converted into PCL code. (BTW, if anyone has code/expertise in
generating PCL from images, please contact me!)

-John

John Kuczynski
Issentia, Inc.
Mobile Solutions Consulting



(e-mail address removed) (Deadly_Bait) wrote in

 

[Deadly_Bait]

John,

Thanks for the new option. At first I was thinking it would work, but
then I noticed the little Visa and Mastercard logos that need to be on
the invoices. So, unless anyone knows how to deal with the images, I
guess that won't work for me after all.

I did find another solution that may work for me. Apparently
FieldSoftware has a PocketHTMLprint_NetCF SDK that will let me print
HTML files. Compared to the PrinterCE.NetCF SDK, this one is a lot
cheaper. If I can convince the boss to spring for this, it should do
the job.

Of course, it'd still be nice if I could find a solution that didn't
involve third party tools.

Deadly_Bait

 

[Alberto Silva - MVP]

Hi,
The Extech thermal printers come with a license to PrinterCE, so if you
haven't shoosed yet the printer you may consider them...

Alberto Silva