-textpresentation
Control whether the printed text is broken into words or segments when written.
Syntax
-textpresentation 0|1|2|4
Description
The HTM and ZPL driver defaults to -textpresentation 1 (always a line-at-a-time). Most other drivers (PCL included) default to -textpresentation 0.
The output of text to printers relies on accurate knowledge of the exact printer handling of font metrics. This can vary, depending on the printer models, resolution, etc. For this reason, Merge normally breaks lines of text into words and sometimes smaller word-segments and positions each independently. This reduces the occurrence of text overlap or right-justification errors. The -textpresentation command allows you to override this default behavior.
-PDFCompress N (naturally this will generate (much) bigger PDF files).Text Presentation Options
1 (Whole line) - each line of text is printed as a single unit, rather than being broken into smaller segments. This can be useful in the generated output if you are actually parsing the output file to recover text for other purposes. It will also result in slightly smaller output files.
The downside of -textpresentation 1 is that you may find that text lines end up slightly too long, or too short which can be an issue if long lines are supposed to be right-justified. This is particularly noticeable when printing text for something like a table of contents, where a long row of dots is followed by a page number. If that text is right-justified with the aim of aligning the page numbers, -textpresentation 1 may not accurately align that text. Using the default -textpresentation 0 option should fix that problem.
2 (Shrink font) - used to reduce the size of the font. Works only with HTML and EML configuration.
4 (Rasterized Text) - converts the label/field into an image, allowing any font to be used regardless of printer capabilities. This is particularly useful for forms requiring non-standard fonts like Arial in ZPL labels.
If you use rasterized text, the text quality may be slightly degraded.
Can be specified as a command-line option (CLO) or directly as an object tag in the label configuration.
See Also
