Force Printing to Pause Between Print Jobs - Zebra ZPL printers

Description

Many times label jobs will be requested while a printer is printing a previous job, or when assemblies that need to be retooled from one job to the next job require a delay in production.

When this happens customers would like a way for the labels to automatically pause the printer when the first printing job has completed. 

When they are ready for the second printing job, they can un-pause the printer and receive the labels that were previously sent.

Without pausing the printer, the printer would print all the jobs as soon as it could, causing a pile up of printed labels for stock that is incorrect.

Here are a couple of ways that this can be avoided.

Solution 1 - Pause at the end of the job

A control label can be included at the end of the normal label job that includes a custom command to pause the printer.

As a result, each PAS file will have an additional label at the end of the job.

Last Job Label A label is a design area on the computer screen where a label format is created or edited.

*PRINTLABEL

Control Label - Includes a custom command ^XA ~PP ^XZ

*PRINTLABEL 

The ~PP command instructs the printer to pause after the current label, and to continue printing, the pause button on the front of the printer needs to be pressed.

Alternate commands can be to use, such as ^MMP,N in place of the ~PP, this instructs the printer to enter Peel off mode without pre-peel being selected.  Then the printer should stop after the current label waiting for the current label to be torn off the printer.

Solution 2 - Pause after each label

If the desired behavior is to pause after each label, instead of after the label job, then putting the same custom commands on the label will cause the printer to pause after each label.

This can be configured through the Label Options interface, as shown below.

Result

The results of these steps will be that printing is paused until a user intervention unpauses the printer.