Downloading soft fonts to Zebra printers with Adobe Output Designer / Adobe Central Output Server.

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1 Adobe Enterprise & Developer Support Knowledge Article ID: c4365 bc Downloading soft fonts to Zebra printers with Adobe Output Designer / Adobe Central Output Server. This procedure is not supported by Adobe, and is provided without warranty. Use Z Tools, provided by Zebra Technologies, to download fonts to Zebra printers This document describes how to use Z Tools, provided by Zebra Technologies, to download fonts to Zebra printers, and how to configure Adobe Output Designer or so that the fonts can be used from Adobe Central Output Server 5.5. This document talks about using WinLatin2 fonts so that characters from that code page can be printed on Zebra; however, in theory any code page could be supported using the same methodology. To download WinLatin2 fonts to Zebra printers, you must: Obtain Z Tools from the Zebra web site Modify the Z Tools definition of the Latin 2 symbol set Download the font to the printer Configure Output Designer to use the downloaded font Obtain Z Tools from the Zebra web site Go to click on the Z Tools link near the bottom of the page to access the Z Tools download page. Once the file has been downloaded, open it to install the Z Tools package. If you take the default installation path, the package will be installed in C:\ZTOOLS. This document assumes that you have installed to the default location. Modify the Z Tools definition of the Latin 2 symbol set The Z Tools package contains definitions of symbol sets that do not contain the Euro character, whereas the Euro character is found in most fonts on Windows systems. In order to print the Euro character, you must modify the symbol set definition file to include the Euro character From the C:\ZTOOLS\SYMBOLS directory, open the file TTWE.SYM with a text editor. Approximately 5 lines down from the top of the file, locate the line: /num chars = 216 Add a character to the symbol set by changing 216 to 217. The line now reads: /num chars = 217 Locate the line that begins with 127. After this line, insert a new line which reads: 128 0x20AC ; Euro Save the TTWE.SYM file.

2 2 Download the font to the printer Obtain a font listing from the printer. You do this using the menus on the front of the printer. The printer will print a label that looks something like this: From the Start menu, start the Z Tools program. From the Convert menu, click True Type, then click Browse and go to your Fonts directory. Choose a font to download. Be aware that the utility cannot download all symbol sets from all fonts (even if the characters are in the font). For this example, the Comic font, which is stored in the file comic.ttf, was chosen. When the font is selected, the name will appear in the top field of the dialog box. Select the symbol set from the drop down list. The Zebra code for Latin 2 (CE) is WE, so select WE from the list.

3 Click Convert to produce the download file. Look in the directory C:\ZTOOLS\FONTS. If the conversion was successful, you will see a new file named COMIC.ZST. In order to invoke the font from Central, the printer must associate a Font Name with the font. Valid Font Names are the letters A-Z and the digits 0-9. From the left hand column of the font listing above you can see the Font Names which are already in use. For this example, the letter K was chosen as the Font Name. To define a Font Name, open the COMIC.ZST file with a text editor. Move to the end of the file and add a line that reads: ^XA^CWK,R:COMIC.FNT^XZ These are ZPL commands that associate the letter K (after ^CW) with the font file R:COMIC.FNT. Save the file, then copy it to the printer: Copy /b COMIC.ZST printer_location_and_name The font is now downloaded to the printer and ready to use. To verify this, print another font list. It should look something like this: 1 The font will remain available until the printer is switched off, or another font is associated with the Font Name K. Copy the COMIC.ZST file to the printer to restore the font. Configure Output Designer to use the downloaded font Start Output Designer and click File > Presentment Targets. Select a PCL 5 printer as the default target. For this example, HP LaserJet 4 (PCL5) - [HPLJ4] was selected. You will need to generate a PCL font cartridge as a starting point. Click Font Setup, then the TrueType tab.

4 4 3. Select Permanent Soft font, the WinLatin2 - (CE) symbolset, then select the TrueType file comic.ttf. Enter Comic as the name for the font cartridge and the click Create Soft Font Click Cancel, and then click Cancel again - you do not want to include this font cartridge in the configuration for the PCL printer. In the Output Designer Config folder you will find 2 files named COMIC.L4 and COMIC.L4S. Delete the COMIC.L4 file and rename the COMIC.L4S file to COMIC.ZPL. Open the COMIC.ZPL file in a text editor and make these changes: Change the title block to read: ZPL Single-byte TrueType Fonts Add a line after the title block which says: CWidthFactor PCL character width tables are generated at 300 dpi. This is the conversion factor required to convert their dimensions to microns. Change the Primary and Secondary entries to read: Primary \94CFK,%d,%d\94CI0\94AK%s,%d,%d\94FR Secondary \94CFK,%d,%d\94CI0\94AK%s,%d,%d\94FR These are the font selection sequences for the scalable font K. Delete the Preamble, FontFile, and Postamble lines from the file.

5 5 7. Save the file. The COMIC.ZPL file now looks like this:

6 6 8. Now add the Comic font cartridge to your Zebra printer configuration. In Output Designer, click File > Presentment Targets and verify that your Zebra printer is selected as the default target. Click Font Setup. You will see Comic in the list of cartridges. Select it, click OK and then click OK again. You now have the font Comic Sans MS (CE) available for use. Product Adobe Central Output Server, version 5.5 Platform(s) IBM AIX-RS6000 (32 bit) 4.3.3, 5.1, and 5.2 Red Hat Linux 7, 8, and 9 (Intel x86) Sun Solaris 8.0, and 9.0 (SPARC) SuSE 8 (Intel x86) Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Microsoft Windows XP Professional Product Adobe Output Designer, Version 5.5, and Platform(s) Microsoft Windows XP Professional Adobe Systems Incorporated 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA USA Adobe, the Adobe logo, and Better by Adobe. are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2005 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.