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 offer the same level of support for 3rd party drivers as Windows, the BarTender Mobile App must rely on driver support and resources already available on 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
BarTender Cloud
BarTender Cloud utilizes universal, driverless printing and therefore doesn't need an installed Driver by Seagull printer driver.
The first time that you use BarTender Cloud to print a document, you are prompted to install the Print Gateway service. BarTender Cloud uses this service to automatically detect installed client printers, and it takes advantage of the nearly 8,000 printer drivers that are available with Drivers by Seagull, which are already installed in BarTender Cloud, so you can print to any of these printers without needing to install individual
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.
This only applies to Print Portal sites, however, as BarTender Cloud only supports client-side printers. BarTender Cloud utilizes PDF printing to print to non-native printers.