FAQ: TFORMer Linux/UNIX

One reason for this problem could be related to the page size. If so the problem could be located in the PPD file.

May be you must also change

Error "CUPS was not found. CUPS support disabled..."

TFORMer SDK (Linux) tries to open the libcups.so during runtime. If the file is not found you will get the following error message when you start TFPrint:

Warning: Cups was not found.
Cups support will be disabled.
No cups printer named XXX was found on your system.
SetPrinterName caused error!

If you have have libcups.so.2 or libcups.so.1 on your system then it should work if you set a symbolic link to one of these files called libcups.so.

In most cases the Arial TTF font is missing.

Thanks to fontconfig you can easily install new truetype fonts.

Install the fonts for a specific user

Just copy the truetype files to $HOME/.fonts/ and run:

fc-cache

You must do this under the (all) user account(s), which finally will use TFORMer SDK.

Install the fonts for all users

Just copy the truetype files to /usr/share/fonts and run (as root!):

fc-cache

Get more infos

You can cache all fonts with verbose output:

fc-cache -v -f

You can improve the speed of ZPL-II output generation by disabling “Dithering” in the TFORMer.xml configuration file. Set dither-mode=”2”.

<ZEBRA form="A4" orientation="portrait" compression="rle" scaling="0" 
    dont-dither-text="1" dither-mode="2" resolution="203">
<Header>^MMT</Header>
</ZEBRA>

The following shell script (AIX, HP-UX) shows you how to generate a print file with tfprint and send this file immediately to the printer.

#!/bin/sh

# Test if enough command-line arguments where specified
if test $# != 3
    then
    echo "To few command-line arguments specified"
    echo "Usage:"
    echo " $0 TFF DATAFILE PRINTER"
    exit 1
fi

# make a temporary file name
PRINTFILE=`mktemp /tmp/tfprint.$$.XXXXXX`
OUTFILE=`mktemp /tmp/tfprint.$$.XXXXXX`
ERRFILE=`mktemp /tmp/tfprint.$$.XXXXXX`

# generate output to the temp file
tfprint -F "$1" -d "$2" -dt xml -o $PRINTFILE -ot ps 1> $OUTFILE 2> $ERRFILE

RETCODE=$?
if test $RETCODE -ne 0
    then 
    echo "TFPrint reported an error: $RETCODE"
    # print tfprint stderr
    cat $ERRFILE
    exit $RETCODE
fi

# print tfprint stdout
cat $OUTFILE

# print output file
lp -d$3 $PRINTFILE

# remove temporary print file
rm $PRINTFILE
rm $OUTFILE
rm $ERRFILE