A small XML-based markup language for tickets
As part of the code I write for Imperial Cinema, I decided I need some way of cleanly abstracting over multiple different (but similar) ticket printers.
I decided on a sort-of HTML-ish language, for which you will find a parser and ticket printing backend for the following receipt printers:
- Citizen CBM-1000
- IBM 4610 family (tested on the 4610-TF6)
The XML document has the following sort of style:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ticket>
<head>
<logo num="1" />
not bold<b> suddenly bold</b> not bold again<br />
not underlined <u>suddenly underlined</u> not underlined<br />
now <b>for <u>a mix</u></b> <u>of <b>settings</b></u><br/>
<align mode="center"><logo num="2" /></align>
base font<br />
<font width="2">2x wide</font><br />
<font height="2">2x high</font><br />
<font width="2" height="2">2x big</font><br />
<font width="8" height="8">MASSIVE</font>
</head>
</ticket>(Note that this document is formatted neatly - leading per-line whitespace is NOT stripped by the parser and may cause you issues!)
The following tags are implemented - unknown tags are ignored (but are still recursed into!):
ticket: this is the root tag and is not treated speciallyb: activates emphasis (usually bold)u: activates underlininglogo num="NUMBER": prints pre-loaded image NUMBERalign mode="left|right|center": changes the alignment of textbr: prints a newlinefont (width="WIDTH") (height="HEIGHT"): changes the font width/height multiplier
At the moment there's a fairly simplistic API. In order to get started, you'll need some sort of file-like output device. This is usually a PySerial Serial object.
import serial
output = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyS1', 19200)Now that you have an output device, you can construct a Backend. At present there's a choice of two, the CbmBackend (for Citizen CBM-1000 printers) and the Ibm4610Backend (for IBM 4610 series printers). Backends are up to take whatever arguments they choose - at the moment this is just the output device they should talk to.
backend = ticketml.Ibm4610Backend(output)Now you can finally construct a parser. This takes place in two stages - first you parse the input XML, then you tell the parser to render it to the output device:
ticket = ticketml.TicketML.parse('<?xml version="1.0" ?>\n<ticket>Hello! This is my first ticket!</ticket>')
context = {}
ticket.go(context, backend)The context parameter is unused at the moment, but is planned to be used for future templating functionality.
