Support for printing asset labels on-demand, and support for dedicated label printers

[victorhooi]

What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature?

Currently, there doesn't appear to be a way to easily print labels on demand for assets stored in Homebox.

There is only the ability to pre-print label sheets (via https://homebox.fly.dev/reports/label-generator), which

Furthermore, there is no support for dedicated label printers (e.g. Brother, Rhino, Brady etc.)

What is the solution you are proposing?

It would be great to have the ability to quickly print asset labels on demand in Homebox.

For example, a button next to each asset that quickly prints the label for that asset, or the ability to bulk-select some assets (e.g. via checkboxes), then clicking a "Print" button to print all of those.

Each label should have a QR code that links back to Homebox, as well as possibly some other barebones info. (The rest can be looked up in Homebox). Open to ideas on what "barebones" means here.

Also, this functionality should integrate with both standard printers (e.g. A4, US Letter), as well as normal hardware label printers (e.g. Brother, Rhino, Brady etc.). However, this functionality makes more sense with dedicated label printers - where you can just print individual labels very quickly and economically.

I have some Brother label printers I'd be happy to test with (e.g. Brother PT-950 NW), or Brady ones.

There was an earlier discussion around this topic (in the old Github repo) here:

https://github.com/hay-kot/homebox/discussions/273

For comparison, the InvenTree project has support for printing directly to label printers:

https://docs.inventree.org/en/latest/extend/machines/label_printer/

Here is the source code for their Brother support:

https://github.com/inventree/inventree-brother-plugin

Other systems like Snipe-It, Shelf etc also support label printers directly.

What alternatives have you considered?

No response

Additional context

No response

Contributions

• [X] I have searched through existing issues and feature requests to see if my idea has already been proposed.
• [ ] If this feature is accepted, I would be willing to help implement and maintain this feature.
• [X] If this feature is accepted, I'm willing to sponsor the development of this feature.

[tankerkiller125]

Please take a look at https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox/discussions/53 when you get a chance. We're aware of issues with the label printing process are are looking to do an overhaul.

[victorhooi]

I took some screenshots to show how Snipe-It and InvenTree do their label functionality - hopefully that helps.

Snipe-It

For reference, Snipe-It's documentation on their asset label printing functionality:

https://snipe-it.readme.io/docs/asset-labels

You can bulk-select multiple assets, then click the "Generate Labels" button:

Alternatively, for each individual asset, there's also a "Generate Label" button:

If you click this - you can redirected to an auto-generated PDF file, which you can then save, or print:

If you go to Settings, Labels, you can see they have a list of templates (e.g. for Avery label sheets, for Brother lable pritners, for Dymoi label pritners etc:

Furthermore, scrolling down, there's a preview of the generated labels, and the ability to customise the fields:

They also have some documentation about how to get this to work with stand-alone label printers:

https://snipe-it.readme.io/docs/-asset-label-printer-examples-and-settings

Not sure how this does with the templates in the earlier screenshot - that might replace the need to do this.

InvenTree

You can select the template in the top field, then which plugin to use (e.g. output to a PDF, or to a physical label printer, or to one of those Avery-style label sheets):

In this case, the PDF output downloads in your browser (as compared to Snipe-It, where the PDF will open in the browser directly - personally I find opening it more intuitive than downloading it, as you can print it directly - although I guess this is just MIME types):

[dcnoren]

/boss $100

[boss-bounty[bot]]

Total Bounty: $100 + €10

Bounties

Bounties paid automatically on close:

• @dcnoren: $100
• @tioan: €10

[tioan]

/boss €10

[eeble]

I just want to add that some of the brother printers like the 820 series also support the concept of on-printer templates which makes the process vastly more simple. You basically send a request to the printer with the template ID and any data that you want to populate in that template and it handles everything else for you including generating QR codes or other barcodes if the template has that.