Advanced printing (labels and otherwise)

[Daniel Scott]

Hi:

I've updated the printing documentation with a new section, "Printing with Hatch" (https://biblio.laurentian.ca/tickets/conifer/wiki/StaffClientprinting#PrintingwithHatch)

Per the documentation's intro:

Hatch is both a browser extension and an application that you can install to gain more control over your printing in Evergreen.

The main advantages it offers offer the browser-based printing are:

• Hatch prints directly to the printer you have configured for each task (Receipt, Label, Mail, Offline) instead of opening a print dialogue and forcing you to select a printer
• For label printing, Hatch only prints one label, instead of forcing you to change the Pages in the print dialogue to "1"
• For label printing, Hatch narrows the gaps between rows on the label
  

The main disadvantages of Hatch vs. browser-based printing are:

• It requires you to install both a browser extension and a program on each workstation where you want to use Hatch, meaning more moving parts for each upgrade and more possible points of failure.
  
• The Hatch program is only available for download on Windows. It can also be manually installed (but requires a high level of technical knowledge) on Linux. It is not available on MacOS.
• Currently (as of 2020-01-16) the Hatch browser extension can only be used on Chrome, as there is a bug with the Firefox extension.

For those of you who struggled to get the browser-based printing approach to fit enough lines on your spine labels with a large font, trying out the Hatch approach to printing might be worthwhile.

If you try it out, let me know how it works for you. I've set up Hatch-based printing in the J.N. Desmarais Library and it seems to be working well, based on about one week worth of anecdata...

Best,

Dan

--

Dan Scott
Associate Librarian / Bibliothécaire agrégé
Laurentian University / Université Laurentienne

[Daniel Scott]

I have updated https://biblio.laurentian.ca/tickets/conifer/wiki/StaffClientprinting again - thanks to colleague Christine Morgan at the NOBLE Libraries consortium, the J.N. Desmarais label templates now contain a template for Hatch printing that supports printing multiple labels at once.

The use case is that you might want to scan the barcodes for a number of items (say, if you're replacing faded labels), then select all of the items and click Actions -> Show -> Print labels to print out all of the replacements.

You'll need to re-import the templates and then select and apply the Hatch - 30347 template to get this to work. It uses a 14pt font to allow up to seven lines per label; you can obviously adjust that if you want a larger font at the cost of fewer lines.

Also, if you are printing 30332 1" x 1" labels, the same settings as Hatch - 30347 should mostly work; just change the following on the Print Item Labels -> Settings page:

• Item Print Label - Font Size to 13pt
  
• Item Print Label - Call Number Wrap Filter Height to 4
• Item Print Label - Height for Spine Label to 2.4cm
• Item Print Label - Height for Spine Label to 2.5cm

If you have any feedback, feel free to contact me directly!