# Printing chinese on receipt printer

## eelke

Does anyone around here know how to print chinese characters on epson receipt printers? Its probably similar to old matrix printers.

I do not know chinese myself so please answer in English.

Thanks for any hints.

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## blackwhite

I do not think the printer does not support chinese. the essential thing is the system support chinese input and output, at least the system should has chinese fonts. which OS do you use? and which text/office program are using.

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## eelke

The printer does support chinese, atleast thats what the distributor has told us.

The application is a Point of Sale application that we write ourselves. Communication with the printer is serial. The printer does not rely on OS fonts but uses its own (it cannot use the fonts of the OS). Development is currently on Windows but I would have the same problem on other OS's. 

The printer has settings for codepages and has both 936 (simplified) and 950 (traditional chinese) however I do not know in what format the data must be send. The application has the data in UTF16.

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## blackwhite

 *eelke wrote:*   

> The printer does support chinese, atleast thats what the distributor has told us.

 

do you check whether the epson Co. has the similar printer supporting chinese?

 *Quote:*   

> The application is a Point of Sale application that we write ourselves. Communication with the printer is serial. The printer does not rely on OS fonts but uses its own (it cannot use the fonts of the OS). Development is currently on Windows but I would have the same problem on other OS's.

 

you mean your development team will code the print process in low level, which does not depend on any OS driver? 

The printer has settings for codepages and has both 936 (simplified) and 950 (traditional chinese) however I do not know in what format the data must be send. The application has the data in UTF16.[/quote]

I think the best method is asking support for epson company. 

BTW, I will check my books, and tell you how to print a chinese character in c code. If I am lucky, I find the related code.

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## old_taoist

4 serial ptr, usually they only use the font set build in.

ur ptr may only supports Chinese under image mode like a win-ptr.  for char mode, ptr only uses font sets what already build in ur ptr as a firmware.

so u can: 

a. ask ur dealer to find a extra card that can plug in ur ptr.

b. change ur software. print chinese as image.

if u do sure the ptr supports Chinese like u said, u need add some specical code to output of app letting ptr knows which font should be used. pls check manual.

sorry for my english.

get it? if not, let me know

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## eelke

I have discovered there are two versions of the printer we are using and we need to have the multilingual model. Ofcourse the one we got is not the multilingual model. So the problem will probably be solved when we get the right model.

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## blackwhite

 *eelke wrote:*   

> I have discovered there are two versions of the printer we are using and we need to have the multilingual model. Ofcourse the one we got is not the multilingual model. So the problem will probably be solved when we get the right model.

 

I check my book, there is some codes in DOS  OS for displaying and printing chinese characters, the code is very simple, just serval lines. I am not sure whether this codes is depent on chinese dos environment or not. 

Based on the code, you just know how to devide the chinese character into one highbyte and one lowbyte parts, you know the chinese character is two-byte character.  and write the string to printer device.

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