>On our report we have a barcode font (free3of9.ttf) that we've printed to Zebra 4M. Which about 10% of the printers we have to monkey with to get the font scannable. Zebra tech support said that because we send in the font it's treated like a picture and you have to monkey with it to get a picture to scan. From looking at thermal printers there seems to be two different kinds - the Direct Thermal (which the Zebra 4M is) and Thermal Transfers. From research looks like Thermal Transfers work better for printing barcodes. Does anyone have experience printing to a thermal transfer printer sending in the barcode font and if scanning?

I've always used ZPL directly (it's been a while, though) - sending the correct control codes to the printer. This always seemed to be the easiest way to get things to "just work". If I remember right, we used a library called "rawprint" to send the escape codes (search the Downloads section here). It's a bit clunky to create a report but if you've got a test printer connected to your dev. machine it's actually not as bad as it sounds.

I seem to remember using both direct thermal and thermal transfer, but most things were thermal transfer since they seemed to come out the best and not get "blurry" as they aged. Having said that, I don't remember having any real problems scanning either of them.