Tagloom — Label Designer & Bluetooth Printing for WooCommerce

Tagloom prints product and order labels from wp-admin directly to a Bluetooth
thermal label printer. The browser talks to the printer, so there is no driver
to install, no print dialog to fight, and no cloud print service to pay for.

Use desktop Chrome or Edge, over HTTPS, with Bluetooth enabled. Tagloom
checks whether this browser exposes Web Bluetooth before allowing connection.
Safari, Firefox, iPhone and iPad are not supported for this release.

What it does today

This is a pre-release build. These workflows are implemented; physical printer
and scanner verification is still required:

• Barcodes — Code 128 and EAN-13, drawn at exact printer dots and refused
  rather than squeezed when they will not fit.
• Print from an order, or from many orders at once, with a record of what
  each label said kept against the order.
• Product data on your labels. Bind a text element to a product’s name, SKU,
  price, brand, or any custom field, and preview it against real products from
  your catalogue before you print anything.
• A visual label designer. Drag text, boxes, lines and barcodes onto a canvas
  with millimetre rulers. Elements snap to the label’s safe area and to each
  other, a multi-selection can be aligned and distributed, and there are fifty
  steps of undo. It autosaves, so there is no save button. Image authoring is not
  available yet; existing image blocks must be removed before printing.
• Every property is also a number you can type, so a label can be laid out
  exactly — and the tool stays usable without dragging.
• A print preview that tells the truth. Thermal printing is one bit per dot,
  and a designer showing smooth anti-aliased type is lying about the result. Press
  P to see the actual output, produced by the same code that drives the printer.
• Connects to a NIIMBOT printer over Bluetooth and reads its real specification —
  resolution, print direction, print width and density range — rather than asking
  you to pick a model from a list.
• Prints a test label that checks four things at once: whether the stock is
  the size Tagloom thinks, whether it is feeding straight, whether the printer can
  place a single dot, and whether the density is right. It prints the model,
  resolution and density onto itself, because a test label that does not say what
  produced it is useless twenty minutes later.
• Stores label templates and prints them.
• Imports and exports templates as files, so a design can move between sites
  instead of being rebuilt.
• Prints stock wider than the printhead, and says what that cost. A NIIMBOT’s
  head is narrower than the roll it takes — 48 mm of head on 50 mm stock — so
  Tagloom prints the window the head can reach instead of refusing the ordinary
  combination of roll and printer. The designer shades the edges that cannot
  receive ink, and the designer, order and bulk print screens name the width that
  printed and the millimetres lost off each edge. Anything in those edges is not
  printed: a 40 mm design on a D11’s 12 mm head prints the centred 12 mm and loses
  14 mm off each side. Tagloom assumes the head sits centred on the stock —
  that is an assumption and not a measurement, so print a test label and check
  where it lands before trusting the alignment.
• Two crops are refused rather than printed. A printable window narrower than
  one whole byte of dots has nothing to send at all. A barcode the window would
  cut is refused before any stock is used, measured with its quiet zones included,
  because a part-printed barcode scans as the wrong code rather than visibly
  failing.

Hardware verification status

Everything on the list above is built. Nothing here has been tested against a
physical printer or a physical scanner yet — the encoders are verified against
the published standards and the logic is covered by tests, which is not the same
claim.

Which printers work

Tagloom reads its printer specifications from the excellent open-source
niimbluelib, which describes 76
NIIMBOT models.

Being in that table is not the same as being tested. Tagloom labels a printer
“verified” only after a real device has physically printed a correct label, and
says “should work — untested” for everything else. No model is listed as verified
in this release.

If your printer is not recognised at all, Tagloom refuses to print rather than
guessing at its resolution, and shows you an id to report so the model can be
added.

A note on labels

Some NIIMBOT models check their label stock over RFID and will refuse to print on
third-party rolls. That is the printer’s own restriction and Tagloom cannot work
around it — but it means “cheap printer, cheap labels” depends on which model you
buy, and we would rather say so before you buy one.

Privacy

Tagloom makes no external requests at all. No cloud service, no licence check,
no analytics, no fonts loaded from a CDN. Everything — including the fonts —
ships inside the plugin. The browser renders labels and sends them directly to
your paired printer over Bluetooth.

Tagloom reads products and orders from your own WordPress site and saves templates
and print history there. Those site requests need a connection to WordPress.
Tagloom does not send order data to WP Shelf or an external print service.

The plugin bundles WP Shelf’s shared admin library, which its sibling plugins
also use. That library contains licence-checking code; Tagloom never calls it,
because Tagloom has no licence, account or plan.

Source code

The label designer is compiled from JavaScript before release. Its uncompiled,
human-readable sources ship inside the plugin under src/, together with
package.json and webpack.config.js; npm install && npm run build produces
build/ from them with @wordpress/scripts (webpack). The other admin screens
load the modules in src/ directly, uncompiled.

assets/vendor/niimbluelib/niimbluelib.min.js is the unmodified browser build of

niimbluelib version 0.0.1-alpha.42
(npm package @mmote/niimbluelib), MIT licensed. Its full source is in that
repository, and its licence ships beside it in assets/vendor/niimbluelib/LICENSE.