Printers

Printing from a web app to a label printer needs a helper on the machine the printer is attached to. That helper is the Printer Client, and this page is where you register it.

Managing printers requires settings:printers.

Printer clients

A printer client is one workstation - a packstation, an office PC, the receiving desk.

1. Go to Settings → Printers and add a client, naming it for the place it sits: Packstation 1, Receiving.

2. Copy the API key.

   The key is shown once. MPH stores only a hash of it, so it cannot be shown again. If you lose it, regenerate - which invalidates the old one and requires reconfiguring that client.

3. Download the client for Windows, macOS or Linux from the same page.

4. Install it and paste in the key and client name. See Installation and Setup.

Once connected, the printers attached to that machine are reported back and appear in MPH. The client list shows each one's status, version and when it was last seen.

Printer defaults

Defaults are per user and per document type, so the packer and the office manager can each send documents to the printer next to them.

For each of the three print types you set a printer, a paper size and a duplex mode:

Paper sizes: auto, A4, A5, 100 × 150 mm label, 100 × 200 mm label, or a custom size in millimetres. Duplex: one-sided, two-sided long edge, or two-sided short edge.

What happens when you print

MPH queues a print job, the client picks it up over a live connection, and sends it to the printer. Jobs are PDF or ZPL. You can watch a job's state - pending, sent, printing, completed, failed or expired - from both the web app and the client.

If no client is connected, printing falls back to the browser's print dialog. Fine for A4, awkward for a label roll.

Troubleshooting

See Printer Client troubleshooting for offline clients, missing printers, stuck jobs and wrong label sizes.