Notice: This repo was a clone of the one on Dominic Radermacher's website, and he is the original author. The original is available at (https://github.com/clarkewd/ptouch-print/), with his permission, to help increase visibility of the project and to encourage collaboration and further development.
ptouch-print is a command line tool to print labels on Brother P-Touch printers on macOS.
There is no need to install the printer via CUPS, the printer is accessed directly via libusb.
The tool was written for and tested with the PT-2730, but it should also
work with the PT-2430PC and PT-1230PC (untested so far). Maybe others work too (please report USB VID and PID so I can include support for further models, too).
Models in libptouch.c include:
- PT-2420PC
- PT-1230PC
- PT-2430PC
- PT-2730
- PT-P700 ( see note below about mode switch )
- PT-D450
Further info can be found at: https://mockmoon-cybernetics.ch/computer/p-touch2430pc/
The project is self-contained. There are no additional dependencies.
Open the Xcode project. Use the menu command Product > Run
Brother dropped support for the PT-2730 with the release of macOS Big Sur (version 11.0) in 2020.
I am furious that Brother dropped support. How hard can it be, it's just a simple USB device?
So I brought this Linux command line tool to macOS. (I checked that it wasn't already in macPorts.)
The commandline tool depended on two other libraries:
-
libUSB - so I grabbed the relevant source files, and include them here.
-
libgd - a graphics manipulation library. I just re-implemented what I needed from it in terms of the Core Graphics framework that ships with macOS.
For fonts, You can use any of the font names in /Applications/Font Book. For fonts with variants in Font Book like Bold or Italic just append those modifiers. Helvetica is the default font.
~$ ptouch-print --font "Snell Roundhand Black" --text "Hello World " --writepng "ptouch.png"
PT-2730 found on USB bus 4, device 17
choosing font size=95
~$ ptouch-print --font "Snell Roundhand" --text "Hello World " --writepng "ptouch1.png"
PT-2730 found on USB bus 4, device 17
choosing font size=95
And lastly: Here is an actual photo of the output as printed on my label maker:
My PT-2730 always wants to put 1" of leader on each print. If the print is just simple
text, the PT-2730 doesn't print the first half of the first character. But if I include a small
.png first, then the whole png and the following text print just fine. I generally test by having
ptouch-print write to a png first, as a preview of what will print.
Here is the actual command line I used to print labels for the jars in my refrigerator:
ptouch-print --image /Users/david/spiral.png --cutmark --text \ Sauerkraut\ --cutmark --text \ Yeast\ --cutmark --text \ Yeast\ --cutmark --text \ Yeast\
where spiral.png is: 
multiple lines of text would be:
ptouch-print --text "line 1" "line 2" "line 3"
- As the PT-P700 does not have a toggle switch for the printer mode, you may need to switch the mode first
- If you plug in the PT-P700 and the green light above the PLite button is on, the printer won't be recognized by
ptouch. You must hold down the PLite button for ~ 2 seconds and the light will turn off and the system will find the device again. - This step allowed it to be detected as
vid 0x04F9 pid 0x2061insetad ofvid 0x04F9 pid 0x2064 - This allows it to be found, (eg:
./ptouch-print --info) and also puts it into a mode that it can be interfaced with
"Dear visitor, currently I have absolutely no time for improvements on this project (my free time currently is about one or two hours PER MONTH)..."
You may still, of course, contact Dominic directly if you'd like. But I think GitHub is easier for collaboration, and he has given me permission to host a clone of his repo here, passing code contributions back to him.
The original ptouch-print is GNU GPL 3, so my work is too. libusb is under the MIT license.