🧐How To: Set Up a Kiosk Ticket Printer

Printing tickets from a kiosk

This guide is for printing tickets on a Kiosk running on a PC

To print tickets on the kiosk, you need to connect a dedicated printer to the kiosk and either define the printing settings in the Browser or install the "Cubu Print Service".

The Cubu Print Service is a Windows service responsible for printing tickets.

Using Cubu Print Service

When the Kiosk's print mode is set to "Cubu Print Service", the kiosk will print tickets using Cubu Print Service. The service must be installed on the same machine running the kiosk. The service exposes an HTTP endpoint that is called by the kiosk web application when it needs to print a ticket.

The "Print service port" must match the local service's port. The default port is 8089.

Downloading the Installer

Download the service from the following link and then follow the wizard to install it. The Cubu installer will run as a local Windows service on the machine.

💽 Cubu.PrintService.Installer.msi

Changing the Print Service Port

Cubu Print Service uses port 8089 by default. If this port is unavailable on your machine and you need to change it, you can edit appsettingsFile.json, in the service's installation directory (normally, "Program FIles\Cubu\Cubu Print Service"). Open the file using a text editor (e.g., Notepad) and change the port number in the urls attribute.

For example, to listen on port 9091 set the urls attribute like this:

{
    // ...
    "urls": "http://*:9091"
    //...
}

Save the file and restart the service.

Changing The Default Printer

By default, Cubu Print Service uses the printer set as the default printer. If you wish to print to another printer, set the printer name in the appsettingsFile.json file.

For example:

"Printer": { 
  "Name": "Ticket Printer 1"
}

Save the file and restart the service.

Using Browser Printing

When the kiosk Print Method is set to "Browser printing", the kiosk application will print the tickets using the browser print method. Browsers usually show a print dialog before printing, which is not a desired behavior for a kiosk. To suppress the print dialog, follow the instructions below:

Browser Configuration on a PC Running Windows

Using Google Chrome

Open the regular print dialog once, open up "More settings", make sure to uncheck "Print headers and footers", and set "Margins" to "None". Then select the printer you want to use and close it (you can cancel).

After that, you launch Chrome with --kiosk-printing , --kiosk, and the URL to the page you want to show as command line arguments.

Starting the browser in kiosk mode

"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --chrome-frame --kiosk <kiosk_url>

Using Firefox

On Firefox, open the regular print dialog once, open up "More settings", make sure to uncheck "Print headers and footers", and set "Margins" to "None". Then select the printer you want to use and close it (you can cancel).

Firefox doesn't have a --kiosk-printing command line argument, so you need to browse to about:config and set print.always_print_silent to true.

After that, you launch Firefox with the --kiosk option and and the URL to the page you want to show as command line arguments.

Browser Configuration on Mac OS

Using Google Chrome

Starting the browser in Kiosk mode

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --kiosk-printing --kiosk <kiosk_url>

For example:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --kiosk-printing --kiosk https://my.public.dev.cubu.com/kiosks  

Print settings

Open the regular print dialog once, open up "More settings", make sure to uncheck "Print headers and footers", and set "Margins" to "None". Then select the printer you want to use and close it (you can cancel).

Using Firefox

Starting the browser in Kiosk mode

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --kiosk <kiosk_url>

For example

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --kiosk https://my.public.dev.cubu.com/kiosks

Print settings

On Firefox, open the regular print dialog once, open up "More settings", make sure to uncheck "Print headers and footers", and set "Margins" to "None". Then select the printer you want to use and close it (you can cancel).

Firefox doesn't have a --kiosk-printing command line argument, so you need to browse to about:config and set print.always_print_silent to true.

See Also

Kiosks

⚒️Managing Kiosks