How to determine if a printer is a ticket-printer VB.NET

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Greetings,

I'm trying to expand an inhouse printing-component that we use as reference in our projects to handle printing.
One of the projects I'm working on needs to determine the type of output format (ticket, nametag, A4,...) based on the default printer's type (A4 officejet, ticketprinter, A5 printer,...) in order to properly arrange the layout etc. The idea being that you send a command to this program and that it'll generate the appropriate print-job in the right format.

I'm mainly having issues with determining if a printer is a ticket-printer. Tickets tend to have a variable length, so I was sort of looking for PaperSetting-properties that I could query in order to find out if we're using a ticket printer, but to no avail so far. Not sure if there'd be another way to find out what type of printer we're using.

Over the last couple of days, I haven't been able to find any way to determine what type of default format the printer prints in.
Any help would be appreciated, though I'm starting to think there's no easy way to just ask any printer what type of printer they have.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Greets,
David

What I have tried:

I've tried playing around with some properties.
The PaperKind property returns "custom", but as we have a few other industrial printers with other formats that also return this... it's not very useful.
Creating a named custom paper style that we'd have to set up on all ticket printers isn't really an option, as we're talking about hundreds of printers.
I've used the PaperSize to sort of try and guess what type of paper we're using, but I'm not sure that's reliable considering we have tags that are sort of the same width as tickets too. It does kind of do the job I suppose, but as I said I don't really find it a "clean" way to determine it.

Posted 26-Nov-18 2:20am

DavidMorf

Updated 26-Nov-18 2:48am

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-26T02:49:00

Not sure there is anything which will do it automatically - a ticket printer is just a specific format printer after all - but there is the PrinterSettings.PaperSizes Property (System.Drawing.Printing) | Microsoft Docs[^] which returns a collection of supported paper sizes. Presumably, the ticket printer will support specific sizes rather than A4, A3, etc.

PrinterSettings ps = new PrinterSettings();         // Gets default printer
Console.WriteLine(ps.PrinterName);
foreach (PaperSize paperSize in ps.PaperSizes)
    {
    Console.WriteLine("{0}: ({1}, {2})", paperSize.PaperName, paperSize.Width, paperSize.Height);
    }

Gives me these for my Epson BX305:

EPSON4782F5 (Epson Stylus Office BX305)
A4 210 x 297 mm: (827, 1169)
10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 in): (400, 600)
13 x 18 cm (5 x 7 in): (500, 700)
A6 105 x 148 mm: (413, 583)
A5 148 x 210 mm: (583, 827)
B5 182 x 257 mm: (717, 1012)
9 x 13 cm (3.5 x 5 in): (350, 500)
13 x 20 cm (5 x 8 in): (500, 800)
20 x 25 cm (8 x 10 in): (800, 1000)
16:9 wide size (102 x 181 mm): (400, 711)
100 x 148 mm: (394, 583)
Envelope #10 4 1/8 x 9 1/2 in: (413, 950)
Envelope DL  110 x 220 mm: (433, 866)
Envelope C6  114 x 162 mm: (449, 638)
Letter 8 1/2 x 11 in: (850, 1100)
Legal 8 1/2 x 14 in: (850, 1400)
A3 297 x 420 mm: (1169, 1654)
A3+ 329 x 483 mm: (1295, 1902)
A2 420 x 594 mm: (1654, 2339)
B4 257 x 364 mm: (1012, 1433)
B3 364 x 515 mm: (1433, 2028)
User Defined: (827, 1169)