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38Limitations

Listed honestly – so there are no surprises at the printer.

Fonts: Zebra's resident fonts (0, A–H) are proprietary and are replaced by Roboto Condensed Bold and DejaVu Sans Mono respectively – calibrated to Zebra metrics, but the glyph shapes of the bitmap fonts A–H differ; for exact metrics, register the matching TTF with Store.Fonts.RegisterFont("0", bytes). The human-readable line under barcodes is monospaced, but not true OCR-B.

Not implemented

  • Pharmacode 2D, Response Plus PostMatrix (no public specification)
  • HIBC per ISO/IEC 15434 (data format envelope)
  • Experimental: Deutsche Post BZL (ZPLBZL001) and JABCode – the JABCode encoder is slow (approx. 0.5 s for 120 random Unicode characters)
  • ISBT 128: helper functions only for the data structures DS001–DS011
  • JAB Code is experimental (bit-exact against BWIPP, but no decoder for cross-checking)

Deviations & limited verification

  • Glyph shapes of the resident Zebra bitmap fonts A–H
  • PDF417 (^B7) and MicroPDF417 (^BF) are pixel-identical with Labelary; Macro PDF417 (^B7 with ^FM) and the MicroPDF417 part of ^BT are not verified against Labelary
  • QR (^BQ): model 1 is printed as model 2
  • Labelary does not render ^BB (Codablock F) and ^B4 (Code 49) – verified only against bwip-js
  • Fingerprint output and the real printer transports (serial, USB, Windows spooler, CUPS) are not tested on hardware; TCP 9100 is tested against the virtual printer
  • On Linux, glyph rasterization (FreeType instead of CoreText) differs slightly: bitmap-fonts reaches 0.774 there instead of ≥ 0.919
  • ZplRescaler does not scale ~DG/~DY downloads and binary ^GFB; 1D modules are rounded to whole dots
  • Media, sensor and configuration commands are accepted but do not affect the image

Checking and analysis tools

  • Compliance and GS1 migration are pre-checks against public specifications (state October 2026), not certifications and no substitute for acceptance by a carrier, retailer or regulator
  • Scan-proof grades are a digital pre-check modelled on ISO/IEC 15415/15416, not an ISO-conformant verification; print physics are not modelled. Without a loadable zxing-cpp library (glibc < 2.38, musl) only one decoder
  • Extraction and redaction are rule-based and assistive: no guarantee of completeness, text inside images is not read
  • Printer twin: unknown profile values are not checked (ZPL5001); the print time is an estimate
  • Vector-Lift: text in font 0 (without your own TrueType font), no OCR, SVG without CSS/filters/gradients; PDF only in ZplCore.VectorLift, not in the MCP server
  • Chaos printer: JSON port 9200 and the single-connection port are not simulated; assumptions where the guide is silent are documented
  • NativeAOT: nested POCO members in data binding need TrimmerRootAssembly; musl/Alpine is not a target yet