Industry first: Zebras global printing solution solves multi-language labelling problem

~ free, native Unicode support and fonts enable printers to output all major world languages ~

Zebra Technologies, a global leader in printing solutions for business improvement, has taken the expense and complexity out of printing international characters on demand. Zebras new Global Printing Solution is the first to provide native Unicode-compliant encoding and font support on its barcode, label and receipt printers printing multiple languages, even on the same label.

All major European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) languages, plus custom characters and logos, can be printed right out of the box. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian languages can be added via a simple font upgrade.

With more companies transacting business in more countries, its more important than ever to be able to identify parts, products and pallets of goods plus their ports of call in different languages on the same label, said Ashley Ford, sales director EMEA at Zebra. Our global printing solution gives customers a convenient, comprehensive and scalable way to meet multiple language printing needs, and helps them eliminate the expense associated with recurring font and configuration changes.

The Zebra Global Printing Solution is available for the companys industrial and high-performance Xi series, 105SL, and Z4Mplus/Z6Mplus model printers and PAX4 print engines.  It is standard for all applicable printers and printers shipped in EMEA, which are pre-loaded with a compatible font that supports dozens of languages.

Organisations that need to print labels in multiple languages have traditionally upgraded their printers by purchasing supporting fonts and the additional memory required to store and process them. As businesses expand into new regions, these printing systems become complex and expensive to manage due to font licensing, installation and printer configuration required to support each new language. Another option has been to treat international characters as graphics, which often results in extremely slow printing.

Unicode is a universal codepage (which converts numeric code points into characters) that can be used with any compliant computer platform or software application. ASCII and most other traditional codepage encoding systems support 256 characters or less. Unicode can support almost 100,000 characters from all the worlds major languages, including complex, non-Western languages that can be challenging to print.

Many leading IT systems and enterprise software applications now support Unicode. By networking a compatible Zebra printer to these systems, organisations can print international language labels directly, from within their applications.