Zebra printers are supported by the CUPS printing system but only as raster image devices. This means that documents to be printed are sent to the printer as a large raster (bitmap) image. On some Zebra printers, this can result in a delay of around 80 seconds before the label is printed.
A more efficient method is to use the Comtec Printer Control Language (CPCL). This is a page description language (analogous to PostScript) that can be used to describe the page using built-in primitives for text, barcodes, graphics, etc. An example page in CPCL could be:
! 0 200 200 210 1
TEXT 4 0 30 40 Hello World
FORM
PRINT
This package defines an XML mapping of CPCL: CPCL/XML (with
MIME type application/x-cpcl+xml), allowing CPCL documents to be
constructed using XML-based toolchains. The same example page in
CPCL/XML would be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<cpcl xmlns="http://www.fensystems.co.uk/xmlns/cpcl">
<print height="210">
<text x="30" y="40">Hello World</text>
<form/>
</print>
</cpcl>
Installing this package will allow you to print CPCL or CPCL/XML documents directly to your Zebra printer via CUPS.
You can download prebuilt RPMs for RHEL and Fedora from the Unipart Digital package repository.
Alternatively, you can easily build from the source code:
make && make test && sudo make install