Setting margins of a Label printer

[jrbecker]

I have just purchased a DYMO LabelWriter 450 to print name badges.  DYMO has an SDK, but it doesn't support ANSI 'C'.  I can print to it using PrintTextBuffer, but the margins are very large reducing my print area.  Is there any way to reduce the margins?

[K_Joy]

Hi jrbecker,

PrintTextBuffer just sends whatever’s in the text buffer (characters stored as bits) to a printer or file. You can’t specify any sort of formatting for it, like text size or margins. I don’t think there’s going to be a way to do that just in ANSI C without interacting with the device’s API. Those things will be controlled by functions specific to the device that are probably contained in the SDK.

Regards,

Kelsey Johnson

Applications Engineer

[jrbecker]

kelsey,

I took care of my formatting issues by writing everything to a panel with diffent fonts and sizes and then doing a PrintPanel. I'm just left with a 0.3 inch margin which is too much for a 1.2" label.  I'll try to find a DYMO SDK expert and see if they can write me a small exe that sets the margins to zero.

[DYMOsupport]

Thank you for the observation, we are going to take into account.

Just to make sure you know: DYMO has a blog for developers, developers.dymo.com, where there is quite a lot of useful information on configuring LabelWriters.

[jrbecker]

DYMOsupport,

I checked the BLOG and could not find anything that would help me.  It would be nice, for those of us that can't use the SDK, if DYMO had a command line executable that took parameters to allow users to set some of the more commonly used printer parameters.  That way we could call it from our code.

Thanks,

[D-Cubed]

Hello jrbecker,

Have you tried creating a .NET Controller in LabWindows/CVI?  You can access this feature by selecting Tools»Create .NET Controller.  This will allow you to choose a .NET assembly and create a LabWindows/CVI wrapper automatically.  The help document for this feature can be found here: Create LabWindows/CVI .NET Controller Dialog Box.  

I installed the SDK for DYMO as a test, and it seems to install a .NET assembly in its <dotNET Samples> directory. The DLL is called Interop.Dymo.dll.

Once you create the .NET Controller, you can call into the SDK from LabWindows/CVI.

I hope this helps,