Zebra Programming Language
The Zebra Programming Language ( ZPL; German Zebra Programming Language ) is a printer description language of the company Zebra Technologies. It finds particular application for label printers. The original ZPL have evolved into ZPL II, where no one hundred percent compatible. ZPL II is now being emulated by many label printers from various manufacturers. Among these was here, for example, the monarch Language Interpreter (MLI ) of Avery Dennison.
Later, the Zebra Basic Interpreter ( ZBI ) was integrated into the printer, which according to the manufacturer Zebra Technologies can be seen as an extension to ZPL II. This is an orienting themselves to ANSI Basic interpreter that is primarily intended to avoid in a printer exchange reprogramming software that was previously operated with a label printer from Zebra of a competitor. ZBI it should be possible for the Zebra printer receives the print data in a "foreign" data format and this then converts the data according to ZPL II.
Precursor of ZPL is EPL (Eltron Programming Language), printer description language of the company which merged with Eltron International Zebra Technologies.
Commands
The language commands always start with a circumflex on ( '^' ). Currently, ZPL II understands over 170 commands. Each formatting must begin with the ^ XA ^ XZ command and end with. For example, the font size is x notified to the printer with ^ ADN, x, where x is an integer; ^ ADN, 18,10 is the smallest size and ^ ADN, 180,100, the largest allowed.
Since ZPL is the language for the control of label printers, there are commands for the printer and commands for the current label (label). Commands for the printer, so-called control commands start with the prefix ~. The label format commands begin with the above-mentioned Prefix ^. However, these prefixes are also configurable using the commands ~ CT ( for printer commands ) and ^ CC for format commands.
A command has the following structure: Prefix command code [ parameters ... ]
The prefix is just ^ or ~, the command code consists of one or two letters AZ, and the parameters (if necessary) followed by comma- separated directly. Also be expected ( see next section) Based on the ^ A command. A parameter is typically either a character or a whole number. For Yes / No options is i.d.R. Used Y for Yes or N for No and activate or deactivate. Optional parameters are simply omitted, but the comma must be specified!
Comments, which are ignored by the printer ( ZPL or processor) to begin with ^ FX and finish before the next command prefix.
Typeface
To select a font, there are several commands. The easiest is ^ A:
^ Afo, h, w selects the font f with the orientation o and w Zeichenabmaßen wide by h high. The parameters o, h and w are optional. The font is specified by a letter or digit, the available fonts depend on the printer model. Typical headings are: A ( tiny), D ( small), E ( OCR-B ), H (OCR -A ) and P to V (from tiny to huge). There is also the symbol 0 (zero), which is freely scalable. Orientation has four possible values: N = Normal ( untwisted ), R = is rotated by 90 ° clockwise, I = is rotated by 180 °, B = rotated 270 ° clockwise. Standard is, of course, N.
The CFf ^, h command, w selects similar AfN ^, h, w is the font f with the Zeichenabmaßen out, but that font is selected as the future standard font.
ZPL capable printer supported i.d.R. multiple character sets. To set the current character encoding, there is the ^ CIx command. The parameter x is a number code that specifies the encoding, eg 0 to 12 are single-byte encodings for different states, 13 is code page 850, 27 is code page 1252, 15 is Shift-JIS, 28 is Unicode UTF -8, etc. (You may depend the support of the firmware version and the encoding tables / files from. )