• What is a Ticketfile?
• Why would I use Ticketfiles?
• Ticketfile specification
• Golang library usage
• Contributing

A Ticketfile is a textual representation of a thermal printer receipt.

It allows you to write simple readable text for your receipts rather than having to deal for example with ESC/POS specification directly.

Maybe you've found an ESC/POS library for your favorite language out there and you're wondering why you should use Ticketfiles instead?

Even though they're inspired by ESC/POS specification, Ticketfiles are human-readable (here is a Ticketfile and its ESC/POS equivalent) and manufacturer agnostic. In the future if a new standard emerges we'll do our best to support it without changing the spec in a breaking way.

If you use a library you'll also be tied to a language, Ticketfiles are language agnostic, it's just text. They can easily be generated through any language and templating engine.

Finally, even though they mainly target receipt printers, Ticketfiles are context agnostic. For instance, our Golang library also provides an HTML converter so that a Ticketfile can be displayed in a browser or sent as e-mail attachment.

Full specification are available here.

The Golang library contains a parser and various converters.

The most simple way to use it is through the ticket command :

go get -u github.com/bamarni/ticketfile/cmd/ticket

The following command would then convert a Ticketfile into ESC/POS commands and send them to a printer :

ticket < /path/to/ticketfile > /path/to/device

In case of a syntax error in your ticketfile, a message would be displayed to stderr while nothing would be sent to the printer device.

To convert your Ticketfile into HTML :

ticket -html < /path/to/ticketfile > receipt.html

Contributions and new ideas are always welcome.

The Golang library is a first-class citizen so any change in the specification needs to be reflected in the Go engine.

Released under the MIT license.