[Hi everyone. My name is Robin West. Today we're going to be talking about] printing and how to actually do it in a way that's actually going to improve your customer experience. So I do have a true agenda. We're going to talk about some basic concepts of printing application development Even if you developed applications with printers in the past, it doesn't necessarily mean you know all the ins and outs about what it is to actually work with a printer and some of the details that are good to know ahead of time so you can best utilize the printers when you're doing development. Then we're going to talk a little more about the Best Practices and actually how to code an application in order to use those Best Practices. Then, we're going to talk a little bit about the validation program. I'm going to tell you how to, in a more detailed fashion, really improve your customer experience. So there's a couple of goals: learning the basic concepts of developing printer apps, familiarizing yourself with Best Practices that we recommend, introducing you to some of the terminology, and then talk a little about the validation and white listing programs. This is a very wordy app, and I apologize for that. Essentially, we're talking a little bit about some of the basic terminology here. When we talk about ZPL, which is a common term we throw around at Zebra when we're talking about printers, ZPL is the Zebra Programming Language. This is one of the acronyms we use very commonly, and I figured it be good to actually describe what it is. It's a printer control language. That means it's used primarily to format your actual print out and tell the printer exactly what you want it to print where. It's also used for doing things like set up, getting status, and those kinds of things as well. We do also support a number of other languages in the printers, but we do tend to recommend using ZPL for a number of reasons I'll go into a little bit more later. ZPL command is a specific instruction in ZPL language that is used for any number of things, like configuring, creating a label format, and getting status information. One example is the ^B8. The ^ is actually part of the command. Most ZPL commands either start with a ^ or a ~ ^B8 actually tells the printer to print a EAN-8 bar code. There's commands in there to have it print any number of different bar codes, text, and images, but also things like getting you status There's a number of different use cases for having a ZPL command. Another concept that we tend to talk about a lot is ZPL format, and this is a more general concept for actually being able to create a ZPL form that has dynamic data in it. It has variables that you can fill out later on, so that when you're creating you application, and you are printing a shelf label for retail. You know that you're always going to be printing the product name in one spot, you know that you're going the bar code in another spot, and you know you're going to be printing the...
