Using Google Cloud Print with a Label Printer and Mobile Device
By: POSGuys - 8/29/2019

<h3>This content is provided for historical reference and reflects information that may no longer be current or available.</h3>
<p>3/18/2026</p>
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<p>**Transcription:** Hi, this is Travis from POSGuys.com. Today we're going to go over Google Cloud Print and how you enable printing from your mobile device to a desktop printer without having to directly have them paired. So what is Cloud Print? Cloud Print is part of Chrome, so it's a way that Google created for you to be able to print to connected printers through any devices where you're logged in into Chrome itself. Whether it's a browser in Windows, or Chrome on your mobile device or your phone. It even should work on iOS as long as you have the correct version of Chrome. So in it, when you see the Cloud Print button on webpages, like this is on our POSGuys barcode generator (POSGuys.com/barcode), we added the Cloud Print button so that if you wanted to use Cloud Print, you know, you generate the barcode on your phone, then you can click the Cloud Print, print to your desktop printer. So when you click Cloud Print it brings up a Chrome-specific print dialog. It kind of replicates the Windows print dialog, but it's a little different, it's a little more simplified. You just select your printer from the list and you can hit "Print." So the really cool thing about Cloud Print is that the printer doesn't need to be connected to that computer itself. So I physically have a USB connection on this printer to this tablet right here, but you can print remotely even. So if you're on your phone and your phone is working off of your cellular network and then you need to print something to like your home office, you know you're creating product labels or something like that, you can print from your phone. You just select your home printer, that could be miles and miles away, and it'll spit out a label on that printer. You don't have to be next to it. Mobile printers, like this one, which are paired over a connection; again if your cell device is not on the same network as it, but you need to print to it, you can do so. Go to Cloud Print and then you just select it from that dialog. This is a ZQ620 printer. And we'll go ahead and print that same label onto the ZQ620. So it printed over there. So you can see the obvious advantages of Google printing, allowing a lot of flexibility from using different devices to printing to all printers. So that's the good part of it. The bad part for label printing is that it's not quite ready. There's a few limitations because it was designed mostly for document printing. It was a way to print sort of PDFs from your phone to your home desktop printer, your full-size inkjet/laser printer. So the logic in it was really designed to accommodate the needs of those kinds of printers. The main thing being margin. So, I'll show you a bunch of labels that we printed here. So one thing you might notice that's real common with all these labels is that there's this gap at the top. So that margin is because when you're printing on a document printer it wants to put the margin by default because not all printers can print edge-to-edge. So it's a way to accommodate that. So it automatically puts margins in. Taking those margins out is really difficult. You have to do some kind of trickery with it. You can do things like increase the size of your document, and when you do that it goes from kind of adding margins in on the side to then being wider. There, so, you can see this has actual document size, and this is wider. Additionally, in the print dialog, there's some things that talk about stretching or filling. You can select some of those different settings and then it'll fill up the label a little bit more. So you have to do a little bit of trickery because it really wasn't designed for that. Products do exist that allow more perfect printing to different label printers. Seagull BarTender Enterprise has an add-on that allows you to, again, print from your mobile device to a remote printer. But it's designed to use that label. So it'll fill it up. It has very specific prompts, it has a dialog that you follow that allows it to really take advantage of label printing. You can use serialization, you can use images, things like that. So that's an advanced version designed specifically for the label printing market. Cloud Print itself is being used in that capacity, but it wasn't designed for it. So there's some limitations. I'm sure in the future these kinds of limitations with be an afterthought, and there won't really be a problem anymore, but as of right now just keep that in mind. We've had a lot more success using larger labels than using really small labels. The thinner the labels are, like we were trying to print very small serial numbers, and it was almost impossible to really fill up that full label. But this, you know, 2-inch-by-2-inch label, we were able to take advantage of, probably 80% of it. So it worked out pretty good. And the just the versatility of being able to print from all different devices is really nice. So we'll go into the details on how you set that up. Alright, first thing's first: How do you set up the printer to print? First of all, you have to install the Windows drivers. This is kind of the only workaround on that is if you have a Cloud Print-enabled printer. None of the point-of-sale printers or label printers at this time are Cloud Print-enabled. Zebra has something that allows printing from the cloud, but it's not Google Cloud Print. So don't get mistaken there on it. You will need a Windows tablet, you know, this is a tablet that works, or a Windows PC to be essentially the print server. There's also some devices out there, I have not tested one personally, that are designed to just be a Cloud Print printer. So it's a very, very, very small device that you plug the printers in directly and they just sit in the corner of your room. So those things exist but you'll need a print server, and that's kind of the secret behind it all. You have to log into Chrome. So all printers are connected to a specific account. So, in Chrome itself, you have to log in. Once you're logged in you go to one of their kinda hidden menus of a sort. You type in word "chrome", and you're going to put in "chrome://devices". So this will give you a list of all the devices that you have. This is not just devises directly connected to it. This is any device that you have associated with that account. And then you can manage your printers, you can add them. You have to add classic printers. There's two sections here. We're gonna do "Classic Printers". So if you click "Disconnect", then you can click "Add Again". You can see all the printers available to you. This list is generated through your Windows print list. Those are all the devices connected to Windows. And then you click "Add Printers", and then they're added. If you go back to the Devices section, you'll see all the printers available. After it's added you can see "Manage Your Printers" and you'll see all the devices available to you. So, that's a list of all the printers. It keeps track of different print jobs, et cetera. There's a lot more tutorials on Cloud Print if you want to get into the nitty gritty of it. But essentially once it's connected into the Cloud Print environment, it's available to be print to. It's going to use the Windows settings as well, so there's a few things you'll need to do. In Windows, you'll have to go to the Printing Preferences for it, and you're going to play with your stock size. So these are technically 2 1/4 x 2 inch labels, but my Cloud Print size here is much bigger. That's because, like we talked about earlier, it's trying to emulate a document. So when you go into the Shrink settings, if you don't have it in a kind of a ratio, a height-to-width ratio that mimics a document, the stretching gets weird. It puts in a lot of margin, it prints very tiny, things kind of in the middle of it. So you have to play. The width: I add about half an inch to each side so you add an inch total to your label size. That'll stretch it towards the edges a little bit. And then you pick a height ratio that kind of matches it and makes it a good profile shape. So when you do that then it should take full size, you know down to the full label as much as you can. You can't get around that margin at the top. Not easily. There's some tricks that you can do, but that's for another video. After that's set it's going to be trial and error. You're gonna do a lot of print jobs. Print, see if your image or your barcode is cut off. If it is then you have to adjust the height and the width, and eventually you'll get a combination that works correctly. Okay, so what do you have to do on your mobile device to enable Cloud Print? Not too much. Basically you're just kinda logging in to your Google account that shares the printer information. So if you're in chrome&hellip; You have to have chrome on your device so if you're using iOS, download chrome, you can't use Safari. Android comes with Chrome normally, so make sure that it's an updated version. The first time you click a Cloud Print version, if you're not logged in, then it's going to prompt you for your information. So once you put in your info, then you'll see your printer list there. So it's going to be that same printer list, the first printer is the last printer that you used. Click on it, it's going to be the same dialog screen, just kind of set up for mobile. And you can pretty much leave all the settings. You know, I did create a custom label size. It's the one that says "Cloud Print 3". But after it prints it sort of remembers the last print that you used, and it creates its own paper size. So that's why you see that custom one there, so I just leave it. The orientation: this is one that you might have to change. If you set up your page so that it looks like a piece of paper, then it will default to portrait, and you don't need to change this. If it's more rectangular in shape, then what it often does is it rotates the label and it will print it, instead of printing it across the label it'll print it up and down. So you might have problems with that. So if you ever see a small little barcode, switch it to portrait and it should do a better job printing, or you're going to have to adjust your label size. Like I said, there's a lot of trial and error that comes with this. Once you hit print, then it's going to print, and it's going to use that Windows computer as your print server. So, click print, and then it creates a new job. And once the printer is on, it goes away, and then your printer should print. From the mobile devices it tends to take a little bit longer, because it has to route the job through the Windows computer. And there it printed. I had to actually wake up the computer, it's under my desk right now. Let me try and print one more time. Create a new print job, and it shouldn't take quite as long as before, it should be a little, little snappier than that. There you go, that's about what I expected. And then the print job should be the same as before, and it matches the previous iterations out there. So let's take a look at iOS next. From iOS is going to be a similar experience. Open up Chrome, go to the page with Cloud Print enabled, click the Cloud Print button. And if you haven't logged in before, it's going to ask you to log in. Once you log in you'll see the same printers, the same dialog screen, it's going to be the same process as Android and Windows, it repeats on everything. Google does this on purpose so that it's nice and familiar with anything that you use. I'm going to print to the same printer, the same barcode information, and it should look exactly the same as the previous label that was printed. And there it goes, it printed. You know, at any time if you want to print to a different printer, if I want to go mobile again and print to the ZQ620, I just select the ZQ620 from the list, click Print, and then the print job will switch from the ZD620 to the ZQ620, so that I can do portable printing. And there it printed on the ZQ620. So, same process. So, what's a way that you can use Cloud Print, how can it be useful? One is a very simple scan and print application, if you're just trying to kinda recreate a label that exists. So if you have either a Bluetooth scanner paired to your mobile device, or you have a device with a built-in scanner, like this one, then, you know, you bring up POSGuys.com/barcode in the input field, select the content there, and you can just simply scan the previous barcode. So here I'll scan this one that's printed out. Puts the info into the field, generates the barcode, and then you could click Cloud Print, and then I'll print once more on the ZD620. So if you're doing like a packing list application and you just need a copy of the barcode, there you go. That's kind of an easy way to do it. Adding Cloud Print into your own web application is pretty simple. Your own website. Google has a nice informational tutorial on how to do that. And then you can print either images, you can print the screen, or you can print text, depending on what you want to do. Adding in that functionality is not too difficult overall. So that's the basics of Cloud Print. It works with pretty much any Android/iOS mobile device, it works on Windows. You can pair Bluetooth scanners, you can use USB printers, as long as you have it plugged into a Windows PC somewhere. You can use mobile printers so long as it's on the same network, or it has a Bluetooth pairing with a Windows device. You can use mobile computers from different manufacturers, with different manufacturer's printers. It doesn&rsquo;t have to all be Zebra. This is a Honeywell mobile computer, this is a Zebra [printer], so you can kind of get very creative with what you're using and it's pretty flexible. So overall it's a good tool, but it's still in development, like I said it's generated for full-size document printing, so you're going to have to tweak things to make it work with a label printer. But it can be done through some simple trial and error, and you can get some kind of basic results. Cloud Print is also showing up for receipt printing for cloud-based point-of-sale. We'll go through that in a different video. This is label printing for today. For more information on Cloud Print, or to purchase printers, scanners, mobile computers, please visit us a POSGuys.com. Thanks!</p>

Using Google Cloud Print with a Label Printer and Mobile Device By: POSGuys - 8/29/2019

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Using Google Cloud Print with a Label Printer and Mobile Device
By: POSGuys - 8/29/2019