Set up silent printing

What silent means here

Silent printing is paper with no window and no tap: the cashier settles the check, the bill comes out, and nobody touches a printer window. It is worth setting up on the counter machine, because a busy till that asks a question once per chit is slower than a paper pad.

Printing is a setting on the machine, not on your account. The counter till, the tablet in the kitchen and your laptop each carry their own, so setting this up on one changes nothing on the others.

Before you start

Get the printer working from this machine's operating system first — installed, plugged in or on the network, and able to print a page from anywhere else on the computer. Everything below assumes the machine can already reach it.

The route that works today

This is the browser route, and it is the one to use unless you are running the printer bridge yourself.

1. Install the printer's driver on this machine. Most eighty-millimetre thermal units sold here ship with Ethernet: give it a fixed address on your network and add it as a printer.
2. Make it the default printer for the machine, and turn off the operating system's own "manage my default printer for me" option. The browser prints to the default; if the system keeps changing which one that is, so does your bill.
3. Set the paper size in the driver's own preferences to eighty millimetres, receipt roll. Left on A4 the chit pads out to a full page and half-cuts.
4. Launch the browser with silent printing switched on. Make a shortcut for the till, add --kiosk-printing to its target, and open the point of sale from that shortcut every shift. With that flag the browser prints straight to the default printer and no window ever appears.
5. Set this device to Browser dialog in its printing setting. That is the mode which hands each document to the browser — and with the flag above, the browser never stops to ask.

Without step 4 everything still prints. The cashier just taps once per document, in a window they did not ask for.

Where the setting lives

There are three settings, on the device setup screen for this machine, and again on the print line at the bottom of the till whenever a job reports that printing is not set up:

• Not set up — the default on a fresh machine. Nothing prints, and the till never waits for a printer.
• Browser dialog — each document goes through the browser's own print window. This is the setting the steps above are for.
• Printer bridge — documents go straight to the counter printer with no window at all. It needs a bridge program running on this same machine.

All three offer the document to a printer bridge first and wait about half a second for an answer. What differs is what happens when nothing answers: Not set up stops and says so, Browser dialog opens the window, and Printer bridge marks the job as not printed and offers to try again.

About the printer bridge

The bridge is a small program that runs on the counter machine, listens for the till on that machine only, and drives the printer directly — no window, a separate chit per station, and the cash drawer kick. The till has looked for it on every print since the beginning, so nothing in the app needs changing when one appears.

Being straight with you: there is no installer to download yet. The bridge itself is built and tested; the desktop app that will one day package it into something you can install is designed and not yet built. If you are technical enough to run the bridge yourself from the source, it works, and the till finds it. Everybody else should use the browser route above.

Two things follow from that. Setting a device to Printer bridge while no bridge is running on it means every job reports as not printed, with an offer to try again — the till believes you when you say the machine has one. And when a job does fail that way, the till remembers the miss for about thirty seconds rather than probing again for every chit, so a document fired immediately after you start a bridge can still report the old answer. The next one will not.

How to tell it worked

There is no test-print button yet. Ring a real order and settle it, or use Reprint on a group you have already fired — a reprint re-sends the same chit and records nothing new, so the kitchen gets a ticket rather than a second order.

Watch the print line at the bottom of the till while it goes. It will say the job is printing, then that it printed, or that it did not print, or that printing is not set up on this device. Those are four different answers.

If a window still opens

• The shortcut is missing the flag, or the browser was already running. The flag applies when the browser starts, so close every window of it and reopen from the shortcut.
• A browser update reset the shortcut. Check its target again; across several machines it is worth setting the flag through your fleet policy instead.
• This device is set to Printer bridge and has none, so the job is refused rather than opening a window. That is the setting doing what it was told.

One limit worth knowing

When a bridge takes a job, the till counts it as done. A jam, an empty roll or a station printer switched off all happen after the till has stopped watching, so a green line means "handed over", not "on paper". The kitchen's word is the only check on that.