Point-of-sale (POS) printers are all different, so the implementation of the more advanced ESC/POS features varies considerably between vendors and models.

Some months ago I extracted compatibility information out of the escpos-php library, so that it could be used by the python-escpos team as well. We’re still in the early stages, but both of these projects now have similar compatibility features.

You can the new shared database on GitHub as receipt-print-hq/escpos-printer-db, and I’m beginning to add it to some printing projects that need it.

Today I’m blogging a few screen captures from the new web viewer for this database that has come out today, hosted here (source code here).

Character encodings

Vendors

Printer profiles

Tech used

I’ve used materialize.css with backbone.js and jQuery. This is the first time I’ve attempted using materialize - I would normally have used bootstrap.css for this sort of task.

The back-end data is generated with Python, but the actual site is served as a single-page application, with static JSON files hosting the data.