Printing UTF-8 characters on bluetooth printer

Question

I have an application where I should be able to print on a bluetooth printer, Zebra iMZ320, but I have some problems with UTF-8 specific characters (Æ, Ø or Å).

I am connecting to the device as follows:

        BluetoothDevice device = BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter().getRemoteDevice(macAddr);
        Method m = device.getClass().getMethod("createRfcommSocket", new Class[] { Integer.TYPE });
        bSocket = (BluetoothSocket)m.invoke(device, new Object[] { Integer.valueOf(1) });
        bSocket.connect();
        outStream = bSocket.getOutputStream();
        inStream = bSocket.getInputStream();

After the socket is open, I am sending the data in CPCL:

        String cpclData = "! U1 SETLP 5 2 24 \r\n"+text+"\r\n";
        outStream.write(cpclData.getBytes());
        outStream.flush();

But when I am trying to print the mentioned characters, it writes some abnormal characters instead.

I contacted Zebra, and one of their engineers wrote that I should try the following:

! 0 200 200 80 1 
IN-MILLIMETERS 
JOURNAL 
CENTER 
COUNTRY NORWAY
TEXT 4 0 0 8 COUNTRY IS NORWAY OR DENMARK
TEXT 4 0 0 15 Æ Ø Å
PRINT

But it does absolutely nothing.

Solution 1

Unicode isn't supported in the CPCL language. You can do it in ZPL though, and the iMZ supports ZPL. Check out this link.

Solution 2

it is simple if you try to print a label from android device; when you write the data use "ISO-8859-1" encoding, look:

String cpclData = "! U1 SETLP 5 2 24 \r\n"+text+"\r\n";
outStream.write(EncodingUtils.getBytes(cpclData, "ISO-8859-1"));
outStream.flush();

Solution 3

In my case, it worked perfectly the solution provided by @jsanmarb but using the Code page 850 (Latin-1 - Western European languages) found here: https://www.ascii-codes.com/cp850.html

Comments

[Charles]

If you're going to copy and paste someone else's code you should link to the original source as well.

[Gaurav Gupta]

Unicode isn't supported in the CPCL language. Is this documented somewhere. It would be nice if you can provide the link.

[Ali_Waris]

For hindi fonts, even using this prints junk characters. :(

[andreszs]

This is the right way to set the encoding. Unfortunately some chinese generic printers don't use the right alphabet and still print rubbish when using non-western european language like greek or russian.