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The drivers are packaged as a self-extracting ZIP archive and are downloaded as a single executable file. Once you have downloaded the file, run it to extract all driver files, documentation and utilities onto your hard drive.

Once the files are extracted, you can add a new printer by loading Windows control panel (Click on ‘Start' ! ‘Settings' ! ‘Control Panel'), clicking on ‘Printers' and then clicking on ‘Add Printer…" . The Windows ‘Add Printer Wizard'will now run, follow the prompts,answering the system specific questions until prompted for the printer manufacturer and model.

Most Star printers have a 'series' name printed on the front instead of the actual printer model name. For example, Star TSP700 is the series name of a range of printers and not an actual printer model name. The model name is printed on a label underneath or behind the printer (In case of Star SP500, this would be either a SP512 or SP542).

Many Star printers support more than one mode, usually 'Star Line Mode', 'Star Page Mode' or 'ESC/POS Emulation'. Please ensure that your printer is using 'Star Line Mode', this is usually set by DIP Switch. Please refer to the documentation.

There is a font built-in to the drivers called ‘control' which allows you to trigger special features.

For example, you can switch to the ‘control' font and print an ‘A' to open cash drawer 1, or a ‘F' to perform a full cut. (Reminder : The print mode in driver property should be changed from 'Raster'(Default)) to 'Line')

All of current Star drivers can be configured to open a cash drawer. The cash drawer will be opened at the start of the print job. If you need to control the point at which the cash drawer is opened, you can use the ‘control' font which is built into our drivers. Switch to the ‘control' font and print a character ‘A' to open cash drawer 1.

TrueType fonts have to be printed as graphics which means that a lot of data needs to be sent to the printer. Current serial and parallel ports have a limited speed, which means that the printer will often have to stop and wait until it has received a complete line of data.

Star drivers contain some ‘resident' fonts, which use the character set that is built-in the printer. If you use a resident printer font, no graphics data needs to be transmitted and the printer should be able to run at full speed. When printing graphics (including TrueType fonts) to a Star SP500, Star SP2000, Star SP300 or Star SP298, please try using a resolution of 170x72, 154x72 or lower, which uses a single-pass printing method that is much quicker.

If you are printing a few common graphics(such as a logo) at the top of a receipt. Then you may be able to use "Logo Store" .

Logo store enables you to permanently store up to 255 graphics in the printer and is supported by all of Star printers which have a Flash ROM (Star SP500, Star SP700, Star FVP10, Star TSP100, Star TSP600, Star TSP650, Star TSP650II, Star TSP700, Star TSP700II, Star TSP800, Star TSP800II, Star TSP828L and Star TSP1000).

Once you have your logo's stored in the printer, you can use the ‘control' font to ask Star printer to print them out. Stored logo's always print at full speed.

Utilities for downloading logo's to Star printers can be found inside printer utilities or got by sending a email to STAR.

The Star SP200 and Star DP8340 range of printers are only capable of printing text. If your application is using a TrueType font, Windows will try to send the data as a graphic which the printer cannot print (and will therefore do nothing).

The ‘control' font is a font that is built-in the printer driver, it becomes available to any Windows application that is currently using a Star printer. The control font can be used to send instructions to the printer that can usually only be sent by software that controls the printer directly (such as instructions to open a cash drawer, cut paper or print a stored logo).

A document is supplied with the printer drivers which lists all of the functions of the ‘control' font.

Below shows an example of selecting the ‘control' font from the "WordPad" application (bundled with Windows):

1. Run WordPad
2. Select ‘File' ! 'Page Setup...'
3. From the pull down menu, click and select the Star Printer that you are using.
4. On the font list, you will be able to select all of the fonts that are built-in the driver including the ‘control' font (as well as printer resident and barcode fonts).

From version 1.6 of the Star printer driver suite, ticket or receipt mode can be selected in the ‘Paper Source' option of the printer properties. (In earlier driver revision, ‘ticket' and ‘receipt' modes were accessed by installing different versions of the driver.)

Ticket mode is a ‘fixed' length mode. Whatever your page length is set in application, it will feed to the end of this length before cutting/stopping.

In Receipt mode, the printer will judge the end of the page by the amount of data sent to give a variable page length. For example, assuming the page length is set to 10cm, but the receipt data is only 6cm long, paper will not be fed to 10cm but stop and cut after printing.

Setting up a custom paper size under Windows NT4/2000/XP is very different to Windows95/98/ME, and cannot be done entirely from the printer's properties dialog.

First you must create a new paper form:

1. Go to ‘Control Panel' in Windows<
2. Double click the ‘Printers and Faxes' (or just ‘Printers' under some versions of Windows) icon to display a list of installed printers.
3. Click the ‘File' from pull-down menu and select the ‘Server Properties'
4. A Windows dialog will display which lists all currently supported paper formats (forms) for your system. By this dialog, you can edit existing forms or create new ones.

To Edit An Existing Form

Scroll through the list of forms until you find the one that you need to edit. When selected, you can edit the page width, height and print margins in the fields at the bottom of this dialog. When finished, click on ‘Save Form'.

To Add A New Form

Click the ‘Create new form' check box, enter a new name in the ‘Form Name' field andenter the paper width, height and margin settings that you need. When finished, click on ‘Save Form'.

As long as the forms that you create are within the capabilities of your printer, you will be able to select them from within the printers properties dialog.

We recommend that you set the left and right margins to 0 and set the paper width to the ‘printable area width' of your printer (For example, the printable width of 72mm is common to most Star thermal printers such as Star TSP600). Please refer to your user manual for the printable width.

Note: Star TSP700/TSP700II is set to 72mm print width by default.