How can you tell if a printer is supported by default on the BarTender Mobile App?
Question
How can you tell if a printer is supported by default in the BarTender Mobile App? How can you make any printer supported?
Applicable to
- BarTender Mobile App
- BarTender Print Portal 2021 and later
- BarTender Cloud
Answer
As Androids and iPhones do not have drivers in a Windows sense, the BarTender Mobile App must rely on other services and resources available to the phone. If a printer is not supported, you will receive a message when printing:
Supported printers
A number of printers are supported by default, and support is provided more by the method of adding or by the printer language instead of picking a printer out of a predetermined list. A printer will generally be supported if it falls into one of the two following categories:
- Printers added by the autodetection method as IPP (Internet Protocol Printing) and AirPrint provide the printing support
- Any manual printer is supported if it uses the following printer languages:
- CPCL and ZPL for Zebra printers
- ESC/P for Brother
- TSPL for TSC
Making any printer supported
If you receive the unsupported printer notification or you wish to print with optimized printer code, you can install the driver on the server hosting Print Portal. You can install the driver in a few ways. Here are two suggestions for how to get the driver onto the system and recognized by the printing process:
- Install the printer the client wants to connect to
- Install the same manufacturer/model printer but use a port that goes nowhere such as NULL or a local port that does nothing
Either method will install the driver and have it recognized by Windows. Print Portal will not be using this driver to directly print to the printer. Instead, it will use the driver to build printer code to be returned to the BarTender Mobile App for printing.