Product Features. USB cable to print and design labels using the P-touch Editor software. Brother P-Touch PT-2730 Software Installation Manual. Software installation guide - english. (P-touch Editor, the Printer driver and P-touch Update. Sofware) will be installed (default). The following is the example for Mac OS X 10.4.11. The printer names in the. (P-touch Editor 5.1 for Mac) To use Sequential Numbering function: Start up P-touch Editor. Type the text. Highlight the number that you want to increase. Click on [Format] - [Numbering]. The numbers you highlighted will be enclosed in a square. Click to open the print dialog box.
My goal is to automatically print shipping labels for an e-commerce website based on periodically created .csv-files.
I have the .csv-files ready. I also have the shipping label template ready in P-Touch Editor. This application allows to connect to a 'database' (in the form of a .csv-file in this case) and populate fields.
At this point I need to automate the process of opening the label template in P-Touch Editor and connect to the latest .csv-file, then print all the labels. Since I am running OS X, Applescript seemed like the obvious choice initially, but P-Touch Editor appears not to support it. I am stuck and looking for a way to communicate with either P-Touch Editor or create labels automatically in a different application and print from there.
As an alternative, I am considering exporting an html page from my e-commerce website and setup proper page dimensions and page-breaks, then print this.
Does anyone have a similar situation to mine or know a solution? In the end the goal is to never have to manually print labels and simply pick up the stack twice a day and start packing.
fixer12343 Answers
Applescript Solution:
While Brothers' 'P-touch Editor' (v5.1) does not support Applescript, you can use the 'System Events' application to tell a process to perform tasks. This works by manipulating the GUI, personally I do not like this approach, but it works.
In order to do what is stated in the question, I have written the following Applescript (this has only been tested in a fairly controlled environment on OS X 10.10.1 (Yosemite), using P-touch Editor v5.1, and Applescript v2.4).
See the comments in above script to see what it does. Of course this could be improved upon in order to account for more cases, but I will personally run this in a controlled environment. Most likely a headless Mac Mini that is connected to the printer.
Alternative answer (more appropriate for Windows users):
As @Hannu mentioned, there is a 'Labeling SDK' available on Brother's website called 'b-PAC SDK'. It would technically allow for automatic database connection using one of the methods described in this document, but requires a windows-environment. Since my webserver is run on Linux and my clients all run OS X, I am unable to further test this at the moment.It does seem to be a more 'elegant' solution, however. As I do not like scripting to manipulate GUI. It seems very inefficient.
The P-touch editor should be able to do this by itself, at least v5.x that I'm using (Windows).
I often have an Excel sheet Autofilter list as the source database.
You open the database,
then insert fields into the label,
then off you go.
As I do not have a access to these at home I cannot create a more detailed guide.
HannuHannuP-touch Editor Mac Database
You can generate a label template and upload it to the printer. In the template you can define IDs for each field (text, bar code, etc). Next you can print directly by the network and send for each ID the right data from your website. The printer then fills the data into the template and prints it out. If have done so on my iPad to automate printing labels from a custom app. For network printing I used the QL-720NW via WLAN. The printing is then done with RAW on port 9100 to push the data. The printing commands are explained in the ESC/P command reference handbook.