Network Card Printers + CUPS

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am a product manager for Zebra, a card printer manufacturer. Our products are used by airlines, government agencies, casinos, etc. for id badge creation. Our products are sold with Windows drivers (that pass commands to the device level firmware).

We have a customer that is currently printing by sending direct firmware commands to one of our ethernet printers. The commands originate from an AS/400 system and are passed to a UNIX server/system on their network. The commands contain both magnetic track encoding data as well as text strings and are very limited in terms of what we can print and where. We more typically rely upon assembled image data to print complex images or text. This data is assembled by external applications and our Windows printer driver.

We are trying to understand if/how we could use CUPS or GIMP to better control the layout of the printed information. We'd like to "intercept" the print job, assemble the text data into image data, (leave the magnetic data unchanged), and pass the resulting image on to our network based printer.

We believe - with our admittedly limited understanding - that CUPS or GIMP is our best chance to accomplish this goal. Given that, we are looking to hire a consulting firm to develop this functionality for us and this customer.

I would appreciate any and all information with regard to this goal.

Best regards,

Michael Mushovic

Zebra Card Product Manager
amushovic at zebra.com