Why is my EPL file being printed literally instead of interpreted by my Zebra LP2844?

Question

I'm trying to print an EPL file I've written.

I'm sending the file like this in Unix: lpstat -P Zebra_LP2844 /path/to/my/file.epl

If I send an EPL file generated by UPS, it prints perfectly.

If I send an EPL file generated by my Ruby on Rails app or my text editor, the contents of the file are printed literally instead of interpreted. I've tested with another driver to confirm that my EPL is correctly formatted.

Any thoughts on what the difference is or how I can compare the 2 files? Thank you!

Answer 1

I still don't understand exactly why this was happening, but I found that by embedding an image (an 8 pixel x 8 pixel plain white PCX bitmap), suddenly my labels print as expected. Here's the line I added to my rails view in case anyone has this same issue:

GW,0,0,1,1,<%= IO.read("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/test.pcx") %>