Printer Emulators

Compatibility

• ✅ 2.1 | ✅ 2.0 | ✅ 1.9 | ...

Background

The high costs of printer hardware can make a developer's job difficult when designing a product which has printing capabilities. Various methods exist for printing to virtual printers which avoid the need to purchase physical hardware during the research and development phases of a project as well as baseline troubleshooting of functionality.

Printer emulation is a critical part of reducing the overhead associated with a development lifecycle. Listed below are common printer hardware emulators/methods.

Pixel

OS	Name	Pixel	Comments
Windows	PDFCreator	✔️	Recommended choice for Windows. Download
Windows	CutePDF	✔️	Good alternative to PDFCreator
Windows	PrimoPDF	✔️	Good alternative to PDFCreator
Windows	Microsoft XPS Document Writer	✔️	600 dpi only; known to degrade image quality
Windows	Microsoft Print to PDF	✔️	600 dpi only; known to degrade image quality
macOS	RWTS PDFwriter	✔️	Recommended choice for MacOS. Download
macOS	Lisanet PDFwriter	✔️	Requires workarounds for macOS 10.10+
Linux	CUPS-PDF	✔️	Recommended choice for Linux. Download via apt/dnf/etc

Raw

OS	Name	Raw	Comments
Windows	QPCPrint	✔️ ESC/P2	Windows 7 or lower, disable UAC. Download
Windows	Bematech	✔️ ESC/Bema	Download (Portugese language)
Windows	FILE:	✔️ Raw	Configure, Inspect output using XVI32 hex editor
All	Labelary	✔️ ZPL	Recommended for ZPL. Visit site
All	ZPL Emulator (Chrome app)	✔️ ZPL	Based off Labelary. Download Note: Increase the buffer to something large (e.g. 50000B) and use "set to host" to print. Alternately, you may add a local printer which points to 127.0.0.1 with the emulator listening on 127.0.0.1. Make sure to click "On" after making changes.