A driver to Toshiba TEC Label printers supporting the TEC Printer Command Language or TPCL, version 2.
Converts CUPS Raster graphics along with a supported PPD file into a TPCL graphic ready to be printed directly. As of yet, there is no support for sending text to the driver.
Conversion includes support for the TPCL TOPIX compression algorithm for reliable and fast delivery of print jobs to the printer. Raw 8-bit graphics direct from the raster driver are also supported but not recommended.
This repository is a fork with some minor improvements, so the driver will compile on recent systems. It was tested on MacOS Big Sur and Debian Buster. The original source can be found at samlown/rastertotpcl.
Pull requests to this project are very welcome, as the original repository seems to be no longer maintained.
Eventually, this project should move to PAPPL, as CUPS printer drivers are deprecated.
Support for the following printers is included by the PPD files:
- Toshiba TEC B-SA4G/T (tecbas4.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SX4 (tecbsx4.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SX5 (tecbsx5.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SX6 (tecbsx6.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SX8 (tecbsx8.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-852R (tecb852r.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SV4D (tecbsv4d.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-SV4T (tecbsv4t.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-EV4D-GS14 (tecbev4d.ppd)
- Toshiba TEC B-EV4T-GS14 (tecbev4t.ppd)
There is little variation between these printers other than resolutions, speeds, and accepted media types, so new printer models can be tested or added easily.
Thorough testing has been performed on the B-SX4 model by the original authors. This fork was validated against a B-EV4D model. Please get in touch if you test the drivers on other printers with success, or run into problems.
The CUPS development headers and ppd compiler are required before compilation. On Debian or Ubuntu, these can be installed with:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libcups2-dev cups-ppdc
Download XCode and install it.
The easiest way to install from source is to run the following from the base directory:
make
sudo make install
This will install the filter and PPD files in the standard CUPS filter and PPD directories and show them in the CUPS printer selection screens.
To remove driver and all its components, run
sudo make uninstall
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
rastertotpcl is based on the rastertotec driver written by Patick Kong (SKE s.a.r.l). rastertotec is based on the rastertolabel driver included with the CUPS printing system by Easy Software Products. Packaing of rastertotpcl and TOPIX compression was added by Sam Lown (www.samlown.com). Original MacOS adaption by Milverton. This fork is maintained by Mark Dornbach (yaourdt).