title: What options are available to developers for printing to a dedicated label printer?
body: <p>Our business uses custom internal software to create shipping labels to be printed on large high-speed label printers.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What options are available to developers (libraries, services, full-blown-software, etc.) for assisting in the process of creating a custom-formatted label and sending it to a dedicated label printer?</strong></p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><em>More background information...</em></p>
  
  <p>Instead of using software provided by a shipping company (such as UPS or FedEx), our business uses our own internal software to create shipping labels to meet high demand at peak times of the year.  Our current code to handle this process is in VB6 and is tightly-coupled to create printing instructions in the EPL printing language.  We stream the data to the Windows print spooler, which is responsible for handing it off to the printer.  This works <del>great</del> in our current production environment with Zebra printers.</p>
  
  <p>Our shipping vendor is changing the type of printer that they use this year, and it looks like we may not be able to use our EPL code any more.  At best, we might be able to translate our code to ZPL, but that still is going to take a ton of work ("tightly coupled" was the operative phrase in the previous paragraph) and I still haven't figured out how to send ZPL instructions to the printer.</p>
  
  <p>In my conversation with our senior developer, I got to thinking that there must already be solutions for printing shipping labels for these types of printers (businesses print shipping labels all the time, right?).  My hope is that there are libraries or software packages available that can provide an API for formatting a label and will handle talking to Windows Spooler or the Printer itself to make sure the label gets communicated in a language that the printer is expecting.</p>
  
  <p>Our current code for this application is in VB6, but if there are .NET solutions available, we'd be open to using them as well.  Any suggestions would be <em>much</em> appreciated.</p>