Zebra's First With Multi-Language Label Printing

Zebra Technologies has claimed to have made multi-language label printing easier for Mysap Business Suite users by offering support for Unicode (UTF-8) on its bar code label printers.

Zebra Technologies has claimed to have made multi-language label printing easier for Mysap Business Suite users by offering support for Unicode (UTF-8) on eight different models of its bar code label printers.

Using a Unicode-enabled Zebra printer, users of SAP products can create and print labels that contain information in many languages and use them in different regions of the world.

Zebra also claimed that it is the first company to offer such support in a thermal bar code label printer.

The company also believes that it is the only known thermal bar code label printer manufacturer to ship a pre-loaded, printer-resident Unicode-addressable font that supports many major languages throughout the world.

Unicode is a code page that converts numeric codes in to characters for printing or display.

Most traditional code page encoding systems, including ASCII, support 256 characters or fewer.

Unicode can support more than 65,000 characters from all major languages, including Arabic, Asian and other complex non-Western languages that can be challenging to print.

Without Unicode, organisations with international label printing needs must purchase multiple font packages, additional labelling software, and printers with language-specific codepages to output all required language characters.

"The Mysap Business Suite users will find great value in the Unicode solution because it removes redundant font, codepage and label format redevelopment costs from international bar code label printing operations.

This innovation will support our customers as they expand globally by ensuring their printing systems can grow with them," said Dave Crist, vice president of sales for Zebra Technologies.

The business suite supports Unicode UTF-8 printing output from both SAPscript and Smart Forms, its form design tool.

That enables users to create and print bar code label formats on any Unicode-enabled Zebra printer without needing to switch codepages at either the printer or the server for each language, said Zebra.

In the company's opinion, eliminating the need to custom design labels for each region of the world and to configure printers for each required language significantly reduces implementation time, complexity and cost for companies that need to print multiple languages.

"Zebra's printer support of Unicode for Mysap Business Suite provides a great advantage for us, especially for our eastern European and Russian activities.

Without Unicode we would have needed weeks for developing a custom solution around traditional codepages," said Paul Bruck, managing director for Austrian-based Bruck Technologies.

As part of a SAP solution, Zebra printers come preloaded with the necessary firmware and font required to print all major European and Middle Eastern languages for printers shipped to customers in those regions.

Support is also available for Zebra customers in other regions of the world.

Zebra said that it offers Unicode as a free option available for all new XiIIIPlus series, 105SL, 110PAX4, Z4MPlus and Z6MPlus printers.

Optional font packs can be purchased for Asia-Pacific (APAC) languages, containing characters for most South Asian languages and specialised characters for traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Olav Reimers, managing director of Austrian-based Integer Solutions, commented: "As a SAP Partner we recognised the Unicode tool as a less cost intensive and easy and fast implementation in to Mysap Business Suite.

Instead of developing a tailor-made solution with existing code pages, we were able to deliver an 'out-of-the-box' tool.

We are now able to supply a perfect one-stop solution to our customers." Zebra has been a SAP software partner with certified integrations of its printing systems since 1999 and worked closely with SAP to provide bar code functions directly from Mysap Business Suite as part of a forms, reports, and label design tool.

A white paper, 'Zebra's Solution for Printing International Characters from Mysap Business Suite (Unicode UTF-8)', is available on the Zebra website.

Back to top