Labels for Brother P-touch tape cassettes — on Linux, over Bluetooth, without the vendor software.
Brother ships no Linux application, and the tools that do exist treat the printer as a destination only: they have no idea which tape is loaded. P-touch Studio asks the device directly — before every print.
- Detects the tape instead of guessing. The inserted cassette is read over Bluetooth, in the background and once more right before printing. If the layout does not match the loaded tape, you hear about it before material is spent.
- A preview that tells the truth. The print head cannot reach the edges of the tape — on 12 mm tape only 9.9 mm are printable. The preview shows that strip, and preview and print go through the same renderer.
- Automatic font size that really fills the printable height, measured from the glyphs rather than from the font metrics.
- Any installed font, alignment, fixed or growing length, margins, line spacing, frame, mirroring for transparent tape, copies.
- Pictures, QR codes and barcodes beside the text, on either side and scaled to the printable height. Barcodes are sized by module width rather than by the space available — a bar squeezed below a quarter millimetre is unreadable, and the application says so before the tape is spent.
- Batch printing from a list: one label per line,
|splits lines within a label. Combined with a single cut at the end this is the cheap way to label a whole shelf. - Templates for recurring labels — everything except the text is kept.
- Symbols and emoji, inserted from a palette. Outline symbols (★ ⚠ ✓ → Ω €) print as crisp vectors; pictographs such as 🔧 📦 come from a colour bitmap font that no PDF can embed, so those labels are rendered as a greyscale image instead — which is exactly what the preview then shows.
- Guided setup: find the device, pair it, create the Bluetooth port and the print queue — from inside the application.
- Command line for batches and scripts.
- Localised interface: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish, chosen automatically from the system language.
sudo apt install ./ptouch-studio_0.2.0_amd64.debsudo dnf install ./ptouch-studio-0.2.0-1.x86_64.rpmcd packaging/arch && makepkg -sichmod +x P-touch_Studio-x86_64.AppImage
./P-touch_Studio-x86_64.AppImageThe AppImage carries the application. The CUPS backend has to live in the system, because CUPS starts it as a process of its own:
sudo install -m 700 ptouch-cups-backend-x86_64 /usr/lib/cups/backend/rfcommPrebuilt packages are on the releases page.
A Flatpak manifest lives in packaging/flatpak/, but note what a sandbox cannot
do: it has no lp, no bluetoothctl and no way to install a CUPS backend, so it
covers designing and exporting labels only. Printing wants one of the packages
above. See docs/publishing.md.
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install buildNeeds Qt 6.2 or newer, a C++20 compiler and CMake ≥ 3.21. libqrencode is
optional — without it everything works except QR codes. At runtime it wants
bluez, cups and the P-touch driver (printer-driver-ptouch on Debian and
Ubuntu, ptouch-driver on Fedora and Arch).
The wizard opens by itself on first start. It finds the printer, pairs it and creates the Bluetooth port and the print queue; the system part asks for the administrator password once.
The same from a terminal:
ptouch-studio setup # find, pair and configure
ptouch-studio check # show what is still missingThe printer may stay connected to your phone throughout — that does not interfere with pairing.
ptouch-studio # graphical interface
ptouch-studio print "Workshop" # tape width comes from the printer
ptouch-studio print "Line 1" "Line 2" # several lines
ptouch-studio print -w 24 -a left "Shelf A"
ptouch-studio print -n 3 "Three times"
ptouch-studio print --pdf sample.pdf "Test" # check without spending tape
ptouch-studio print --qr "https://example.org" "Wiki"
ptouch-studio print --barcode "ABC-12345" "Stock"
ptouch-studio print --image logo.png --artwork-right "Workshop"
ptouch-studio print --from-file shelves.txt # one label per line
ptouch-studio status # loaded tape, media, readiness
ptouch-studio status --json # for scriptsptouch-studio print --help lists every layout option.
Developed and verified with the PT-P710BT (P-touch Cube Plus) over Bluetooth.
In principle every P-touch model works that ptouch-driver supports and that offers a serial Bluetooth connection — PT-P300BT, PT-P700, PT-P750W, PT-E550W, PT-P900W, PT-P950NW among them. Models whose print head differs from the PT-P700 series may have different printable heights; reports are welcome.
Tape widths: 3.5 / 6 / 9 / 12 / 18 / 24 mm.
The path of a label:
layout (Qt) → PDF with an exact page size → CUPS → rastertoptch → RFCOMM backend → printer
Three parts of that are not obvious:
The status query. Asked with ESC i S, the printer answers with 32 status
bytes; byte 10 is the tape width in millimetres, and there is media type, error
state and print phase alongside. It costs no tape and takes milliseconds.
The custom CUPS backend. None of the backends shipped with CUPS cope with
RFCOMM: serial expects modem control lines an RFCOMM device does not carry, and
file opens non-blocking, which fails here. This backend opens blocking — that is
what brings the Bluetooth connection up in the first place — and waits for the
printer to report itself finished after the last byte. Without that wait, multiple
copies lose their last label, because the connection drops while the device is
still working.
Colour emoji. Qt happily draws them on screen, but a PDF cannot carry colour bitmap glyphs — they disappear on the way to the printer without any error. Which characters are affected cannot be decided by code point (⚡ U+26A1 comes from the colour font, ★ U+2605 does not), so the fonts are asked directly: if no outline family can draw a character, the whole label goes out as an image.
Font scaling. Qt converts point sizes against the device resolution. Scaling the coordinate system on top of that for a 600 dpi PDF makes text come out 600/72 too large while every other measurement stays correct. Fonts are therefore defined in device-independent pixel sizes. The tests rasterise the produced PDF and measure the ink instead of trusting the arithmetic.
More in docs/architecture.md.
| Symptom | Cause and cure |
|---|---|
| "printer does not answer" | The device powers itself off after a while. Switching it on is enough. |
| "no access to /dev/rfcomm0" | Setup incomplete — ptouch-studio check names the missing step. |
| "/dev/rfcomm0 is missing" | systemctl status ptouch-rfcomm.service |
| Job stays in the queue | The printer was unreachable. CUPS holds the job for 300 s and prints it once the device is back. |
| Queue stopped | cupsenable PT-Label |
More in docs/troubleshooting.md.
The interface follows the system language. English is the source; German is
maintained alongside it. French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish are provided
as a starting point and would benefit from review by native speakers — the files
live in translations/ and open in Qt Linguist.
Adding a language means adding it to TRANSLATION_LANGUAGES in CMakeLists.txt,
running lupdate, and filling in the new catalogue.
This project stands on the shoulders of two others, and it is worth knowing both:
ptouch-print by Dominic Radermacher (GPL-3.0) talks to P-touch printers directly over USB, without CUPS, and takes PNG images or text on the command line. It also maintains the table of print head widths and printable tape areas that this project's geometry now builds on — those figures come from there and are verified against real hardware across two dozen models. None of its code is used here; the two programs take opposite routes to the same printers.
brother-ptouch-label-printer-on-linux
by Henrik Bengtsson collects the practical knowledge around ptouch-print:
building it, udev permissions, image formats, model quirks. If your printer is
connected by USB and you prefer the command line, start there.
P-touch Studio covers what those two do not: Bluetooth, a CUPS queue, a graphical editor, and reading the loaded tape from the printer before every print.
MIT. Qt 6 is linked dynamically and stays under LGPL-3.0; the AppImage bundles the Qt libraries in replaceable form.