Seiko Instruments manufacture a range of printers designed especially for
printing stick-on labels. These printers are vastly superior to
general-purpose printers (laser, inkjet or dotmatrix) for producing
labels:
no toner or ink needed
print labels one-at-a-time or hundreds-at-a-time with no waste!
very quiet and very small: suitable for desktop use
use very little power
very simple to load labels (no messing with tractors again)
no need to replace very expensive fusing-rollers or print-heads that have become "glued-up".
no danger of the labels being shredded by the printer!
slap is a UNIX program that prints labels on a
Smart Label Printer. Typical applications include:
address labels
labels for audio cassettes, CDs, videos
diskette labels
labels for file-folders, notebooks
ID badges
labels, labels, labels - use your imagination...
slap is a command-line program - a GUI version is planned
for the future. Currently it only prints plain text, but you can choose
any of several typefaces - it is distributed with a set of 16 bitmap
fonts, each in 6 point-sizes.
slap can automatically detect which model of SmartLabel
printer you are using, and adapts accordingly.
Why do I need slap to use a Smart Label Printer?
The Smart Label Printers are bitmap printers - unlike most printers,
they do not themselves convert character data into a pattern of dots.
That is a job for software running on the host computer.
These printers also use special-purpose communication- and
command-protocols - which have to be handled by software running on
the host computer.
Under UNIX, slap does both these jobs - see
the manpage.
![[picture of an SLP-220]](big220.gif)
