I believe the brother label printers (usually USB, thermal, a wide variety of cheap clone labels available) are supported by drivers within the CUPS printer control system in Linux.
They probably are, but for inventory labels like this, where it’s likely that bar codes are involved, you don’t want to print using regular OS print drivers, you instead want to use the printer’s own command language to ensure that bar codes are printed perfectly sharp.
Well, you *can* do decent barcodes via OS print drivers, but it requires some careful management of the print data to get good results. Any raster content sent to the printer, especially barcodes, should exactly match the printer's native resolution, and should be uncompressed 1-bit monochrome. Whether it's worth dealing with that versus dealing with ZPL or whatever will depend on the application.
Source: I got fed up with Brady's shitty label printing software and stupidly limited printer command languages, so I built my own HTML template -> raster image -> Windows print API pipeline. I had to jump through a couple hoops to correctly scale the template content to match the print resolution, and manually collapse the color space to 1-bit to eliminate any image compression artifacts, but everything comes out nice and crisp, even with relatively tight linear barcodes. (Modern camera-based barcode scanners also help, since the image processing has to correct for a lot of other confounding factors anyway.)
Exactly. That effort is precisely why I said you
don’t want to use the OS printing (not that it’s categorically impossible to get good results using it*). Using printer commands (ZPL, ESC/POS, etc)
ensures you get clean results.
You’re definitely right about camera-based scanning. Even blurry bar codes seem to scan well. Heck, I find it almost annoying (on principle alone, as a perfectionist) that my bank’s 2D bar code scanning (for 2-factor authentication, and for scanning bills) recognizes codes before the camera has even finished focusing on it! I’ve also had no trouble scanning bar codes in PDFs where the bar code is stupidly saved as a bitmap image, which a lot of software will then apply an interpolation filter to when scaling for printing, resulting in blur. (It’s definitely better to have it as a vector “font” or vector graphics, so that it always prints sharp.)
*I worked at the Apple Store many years ago, and their receipt printers use OS printing so that it can print in the corporate font instead of the printer’s ROM fonts. They had clearly worked out how to get clean bar codes, of course. But the text is actually not great, you can tell the font is not optimized for low resolution. As far as I can tell, their POS system still works that way to this day.
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