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Wholesale: Print Tiny Barcodes with ZPL on Zebra Printers
Wholesale: Print Tiny Barcodes with ZPL on Zebra Printers

Everything to know about raw printing to your zebra printer for the highest quality labels possible in GrowFlow Wholesale using PrintNode

Ryker Daniel avatar
Written by Ryker Daniel
Updated over 2 years ago

Updated 11/21/2022

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Important note! As of November 15, 2022, we have discontinued the support of PrintNode. We only recommend PrintNode if you are printing 500+ labels per day. If you are in need of PrintNode enabled in your account, please send your request to chat support.

Zebra printers have their own language called ZPL (Zebra Programming Language) Wikipedia link if you want to nerd out.

With PrintNode enabled in your account, in order to get the highest quality print job, it's recommended to send raw ZPL commands to a zebra printer which contains data for what should be printed onto the label.

Basically, this means you can now get your tiny barcodes to scan!

GrowFlow supports both printing PDFs and ZPL. PDFs can sometimes come out blurry due to the way Zebra printers render the PDF down to the actual label.

Now, is ZPL right for you?

  1. Do you have a zebra printer or a printer that is ZPL compatible?

  2. Do you need the highest quality print job for your packaging or plant tags?

Is ZPL not right for you?

  1. Your printer does not support ZPL

  2. You are printing using an inkjet or laser printer

  3. You are printing Avery labels

  4. You need advanced positioning and other complex renderings not supported by ZPL

Getting Started with ZPL

Step 1: Install printer client (one-time setup)

You will need to download a small program onto your computer that is connected to the printer. This enabled us to send ZPL commands directly to the printer from our web application. Head to the top navigation on the page and click on 'Printing' under the Admin tab.

Download the client by navigating to the Download Client tab, then click on the download button. Double-click to open it and follow the steps to install it onto your computer.

Open the PrintNode Client, Printers tab, and make sure that Active is checked for your zebra printer.

Create an account under the Manage Print Node Account tab and hit Save to save your credentials.

Step 2: Once installed, you can select which printers you want to be able to print from

Setup your labels in GrowFlow and convert them to ZPL mode (some advanced features might not work with ZPL) by copying a label first, then Converting before opening up in the V2 Editor.

Select your default printer in GrowFlow and send off a test print job by clicking Test Print. This will print directly to your printer without going through the browser print dialog.

Nice work!

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