>>>I still don't know of anyone who printed to a Zebra without trouble.
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>>ME! The Japanese manufacturing company I worked for printed to Zebra printers at more than 20 workstations on two production shifts six to seven days per week for years. No issues.
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>>Those printers are amazing for what they do. The ones we had were parallel ports, and we assembled a .TXT file to get it working exactly the way we wanted it (formatting, fonts, boxes, coloring, inverse coloring, etc.), and then read in those text files with macro portions (typically something %like_this%), and we would issue STRTRAN(lcText, "%like_this%", lcValue) on them in sequence to update with real content.
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>>To print, we issued a DOS command: "copy file.txt lpt1:" using the RUN / ! command.
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>>Worked beautifully. They printed around 500 labels (kanbans, which were about 3" by 5") per shift, 1000 per day, per printer. And as I say, they had 20 or so at the facility.
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>Printing to anything under DOS was easy. You just follow the instructions that come with the printer and you're sure you'll have it working soon. At some point I knew about 30 ESC/P commands off the top of my head, even hacked fpd-to-pcl commands to print to a HP laser (HPLJ V, IIRC) directly in graphics mode... it was some lunch tickets for hospital staff. Managed even a few receipt printers (for a bar and a cash register) and, the most difficullt one, an Olivetti document printer, which pulls your piece of paper in and then has to print in the next available line.
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>But then they said character mode wasn't good enough and we need to go graphic (but today they warn you against graphic stuff on TV, don't they?) and there came the Windowses. Now between you and the printer there's the driver, there's the printer forms manager or some other wild beast, and the spooler. And the network, if your printer is on it (luckily, my zebras weren't, and I had only two days of fun with them, then the admin took it upon himself to make it work - which is why I don't know how it ended).

You can upload pictures and print with Zebra at DOS mode printing.