Large Jobs Not Always Printing In Order
I have BT 9.4 sending many print jobs to Zebra 170 printers. Most of these work fine.
However, I received a problem report this morning. I have a label with around 20 fields and for this print job of 9000 labels all fields were the same except for a number that sequences up for each label. The text file from my ERP that Commander consumes looks as expected.
The problem: Our zebra printer can do around 3k labels on a roll, I think. Last night the label operator kicked off this 9000 label job, printed 3k labels. Came in this morning (printer waiting for 12+ hours for more stock), put another roll on, and it started to print. However, somewhere in the middle after a while, the sequences more or less reset; so instead of continuing toward the 9000 as expected there was a sequencing reset.
My first guess is this is a problem between Windows and the zebra printer and I've got a ticket in with our Zebra guy to come and offer any insight, but it is my responsibility to see if there is any way Bartender could be responsible for this. Or, even if it's not, if there is some way to mitigate it.
Thanks very much!
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Do a print to file and examine the ZPL for how the serial number is rendered. It could be rendered as a single command at the start of the print job, which tells the printer to start an incrementing serial number which increments one every one label for every label of the print job. Or if the optimization possibilities is less available due to the overall label design, a new value is provided for the design object on a per label basis.
If the former, then the problem will be totally down to the firmware of the printer. If the latter, then you can examine the print code to see if the values in the print code get reset like you experience, and if that's the case then something is going wrong with BarTender.
Either way, I'd recommend performing a factory default reset on the printer just in case there's a gremlin in memory.
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Thanks very much for the quick reply. The raw, text/human readable file itself has 9000 lines and each line is the same as the other with exception of the single field that iterates up or down, so each actual label is being sent to the printer differently; I don't believe the printer is being told in any way to handle serializing itself.
That said, I started logging the raw data to the printer a while back and when I examine the data actually sent to the printer, each label is within an
^XA
<print data>
^XZ
section. The only way these sections differ is a large string of data like this on one of the lines.
Jzt3U2O5Dh2AGAKBMxd8wKN1DUGcDp0pQG8CcMxKSVqUcu+gecaXhhjJXpRu6
I think that's just portion of a barcode perhaps. in any case, I can't actually discern the sequencing number in the data, but it must be somewhere in this, but yeah back to the original thought the printer is being specifically told what value to give for each label.
I also think it's probably a gremlin of some sort, but I had to check. These same labels, treated in the same way, worked perfectly on Printronix line printers, but we recently moved them to Zebra (several weeks ago and generally work fine without issue, but the one from today is new without any code changes affecting it--and it's not consistent; I bet the same job could be printed now and would be fine).
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I would guess you're using a Windows font for the serial number and therefore it's rendering with graphic data on a per label basis. If instead you use a printer based font, such as Zebra Triumvirate, you'll be able to clearly see the serial number values plus it would optimise the print job by a degree.
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I would guess you're using a Windows font for the serial number and therefore it's rendering with graphic data on a per label basis. If instead you use a printer based font, such as Zebra Triumvirate, you'll be able to clearly see the serial number values plus it would optimise the print job by a degree.
Quite right--and in fact this may be a good clue, because this issue does not affect other labels we've run on Zebras, but rather the ones we took off Printronix. in the interests of maintaining font appearance across different printers I moved away from printer-specific (we use Zebra Triumverate on older labels) to Windows San Serif.
At the very least I may consider going back to ZT font for the serial and see if it makes a difference. thanks!
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