Back when I was a junior engineer I made a small system for dealing with industrial printers that took either direct printer language commands or pdfs and exported the printer driver output to a file via the Redmon printer driver output file exporter and then ftped it to the printer over the network. This avoided manual driver installation of hundreds of printers and may still be sold in a new project. It's hacky af but still works and beats alternatives.
I had a Customer who used Zebra industrial label printers for labeling product. The print jobs came from one of their Customers' ERP servers, sent over a VPN directly to the production line.
The Customer might send hundreds of labels in a single job. If the roll of label stock ran out during the job their server would re-send the job from the beginning after the printer was reloaded. This meant somebody had to find and dispose of the duplicate labels (or risk re-using a serialized label).
The Customer said that they couldn't modify the ERP software that was composing the jobs.
A friend and I wrote a parser for the Zebra "ZPL" printer language to ingest the large jobs, split them into single label jobs, then shoot those single labels into the printer. We used Redmon to intercept the jobs coming from the Customer's ERP server into an LPR queue on a Windows server machine. Redmon would hand the job off to the label splitter.
