Receipt Printing with Koha

Some ideas about setting up receipt printers

Put newer items at the top.

• ; 2008-07-28: NEKLS discoveries for Epson TM-T88 receipt printers
• ; 2008-08-08: NEKLS Wishlist for receipt printing
• ; 2008-07-08: Darrell's experiences setting up receipt printers

We use the Star Micronics TSP700 printers. The use no ink, and rather use thermal paper and are very fast. Dot-matrix printers are loud and slow on more appropriate where each checkout is printed one at a time. For a web based system it is best to use a fast thermal receipt printer.

Star Micronics also has CUPS drivers for Linux and is the only one as far as I know to support Linux and Windows and well as Apple. http://www.starmicronics.com/printers/printers_pages/support/drivers.html

Also you will notice on the above link, any of these receipt printers can use an interchangeable port interface: serial, parallel, USB, or Ethernet–which is good for future expansion, although on some models these need to be purchased separately and swapped out.

Our printers work with Linux & Windows 2000/XP, however, be forewarned, the LTSP client interface for Linux is a little tricky for these for some reason!

The effort required to get these printers working was just a little effort, as the printers will auto size for the width. However, the following settings can cause issues:

The *length* of the receipt defaults to 11.5” on some receipt printers and this needs to be changed in the driver and depending on the version of Firefox used (I think) in the Firefox printer setup. Just check and change it everywhere to be safe. Obviously you will need to change other settings based on your needs and setup.

Very Important: Using Firefox, you need to set the margins of the page printed to 0 (or something small) or your document may not print. Go to: FILE → PageSetup… → Margins & Header/Footer → and set Top/Right/Left/Bottom to 0 and then set all headers and footers that you want to “blank” You may want to leave the date/time or something else depending on your setup. Internet Explorer may have similar settings.

Also, so staff does not need to click return on a circ, out circ terminals are setup to auto print whatever is printed. From Firefox2 they will not be able to select a printer as easily.

http://www.poisedcommerce.org.uk/css_print/automatic.htm The above link shows how to setup the about:config setting in Firefox.

Set: print.always_print_silent to true – in about:config

Those two settings are the important ones. Some of the really old dot matrix receipt printers (or older thermal) will have legacy drivers for windows 95/98, as our old receipt printers had, and I just had to buy some new thermal printers, mostly for speed. Many libraries are likely using legacy dot matrix where each circ was sent to the printer one at a time so it didn't take all day to print the receipt. We had legacy Epsons and I had to play with the win 95-98 drivers to run even in Windows 2000 correctly, yet they were very slow and loud trying to print a graphical web page. So we purchased the new Star thermal printers, and that solved most of the problems.

Some old printers will probably work, but one would need to play around with the settings of the legacy receipt printer. Some of the legacy receipt printers have a *lot* of settings and it can be hard to find the right combos.

If anyone is using an old dot-matrix receipt printer, they *should* pay the money and get some good fast thermal Stars or something equivalent as the time saved at checkout will pay for itself as staff will not want to wait 3 minutes for a legacy printer to print a 50 book checkout order. We have not had a single problem with these other than setting the max paper length of the receipt printer.

We have used a combination of driver and Firefox hackery to get our receipt printers to work.

We are using exclusively Windows XP and Epson TM-T88III receipt printers (USB).

Under File → Page Setup:

• Shrink to fit page on Format & Options tab
• 0,0,0,0 for Margins on Margins & Header/Footer Tab. This makes the receipts use all available space on the paper roll.
• Set all Headers/Footers to –blank–. This removes all of the gunk you might normally find on a print from firefox, such as the URL, number of pages, etc.

We are using version 5,0,3,0 of the Epson TM-T88III print driver. Click Start → Printers and Faxes → Right click the receipt printer → Properties:

• Advanced Tab, click Printing Defaults button
• Layout Tab: Paper size: Roll Paper 80 x 297mm
• Layout Tab: Check “Reduce Printing” and “Fit to Printable Width”
• OK your way out of there.

We are going to use the Firefox config options noted above to streamline the workflow, and hopefully have an auto close window script to shut down the receipt printing tab in Firefox after the receipt has been printed.

• That “Print slip” would open the new tab, send a direct request to print (without user intervention), and close the window.
• In current browser security models, printing is a protected operation, and this type of “pop-under, print, disappear” action is specifically intercepted by the browser with (at least) the print confirmation window. In short, it won't be possible without a browser specific hack like “print.always_print_silent”. Unfortunately this circumvents the browser security model for ALL content, not just Koha and presents a minor security consideration. Without it though, I don't think it would be possible even for Koha as “trusted” site. — Joe Atzberger 2008/10/13 19:12
• A firefox plugin to easily change the printer for a single print job without going to about:config (and leaving the “always print silent” settings intact).