DYMO label printing. Font size & printing result issues

Question

I've implemented label printing using the DYMO compatibility SDK as well as the more recent label printing framework using the DYMO LabelWriter 450. Although both implementations work fine in a best case situation there are two things that bother me for it to be solid.

• The libraries offer a nice Auto-Fit option for address labels where the font size of the address is calculated automatically based on the font, number of lines, available space etc. However i can't seem to find the final font size calculated by the library nor a way to specify a minimum font size. This leaves the possibility for long addresses to be printed unreadably small. On the other hand implementing this whole font measuring functionality myself simply makes the Auto-Fit functionality useless.

• The second issue i got is that the print jobs are placed into the windows printing queue without any way to block until the print job completed successfully or receive any kind of feedback. In fact in case the printer is turned off the print job doesn't even receive a status and hangs indefinetely within the queue. When using the label printing framework and not the older SDK at least this issue can be worked around by testing if the printer is connected and turned on before sending the printjob and hoping for the best ;).

Did any of you work with those libraries and got better solutions to those issues?

Answer 1

In reading the guide found here: http://download.dymo.com/usermanuals/create_label_content.pdf

In the Object Details section, it shows a "Text Scaling" option, which the default is text to fit. In the XML definition that yields the following TextFitMode element, which the setting needed is "None" instead of "ShrinkToFit".

<TextObject>
 ..
 <TextFitMode>None</TextFitMode>
 ..
</TextObject>

This can be done in the Dymo Label 8, by right-clicking on the label and selecting Properties, finding the Text Scaling dropdown in the properties window. If the properties window doesn't show up in the right-click menu, I had some trouble with getting it to show up.