Ben Faerber

Builder of Stripy Horse · GitHub

Why listen to me about label printing?

I've spent five years as a software engineer building warehouse fulfillment systems: the software that turns orders into scannable labels on real thermal printers, at production volume, where a barcode that won't scan stops a shipping dock. My office is inside the warehouse: most people who write developer tools have never stood next to the printer their code breaks. I walk past ours every day.

Along the way I built and open-sourced the tools the work demanded:

pdf-to-zpl - PDF-to-ZPL conversion, 27,000+ installs powering label generation in production systems around the world
usb-scale - a Rust library for reading the USB shipping scales that sit next to those printers

Stripy Horse is those years turned into a platform: the tooling I kept wishing existed. Convert PDFs, images and HTML to ZPL with an engine cross-validated on thousands of physically printed carrier labels. Preview ZPL pixel-true. And test the whole printing pipeline against virtual Zebra printers that behave like the real firmware (status queries, fault injection, hold queues) so label bugs fail your CI build instead of your warehouse.

A Stripy Horse business-card label and a strip of small stripyhorse.io stickers, printed on a Zebra thermal printer — Our own business card and stickers, printed on the Zebra next to my desk from ZPL this engine generated.

I write the guides here from production experience, not documentation summaries. If something's wrong or missing, tell me; I read every note personally.

Work with me

I take on a limited number of consulting projects in the space I know best: label-printing pipelines, PDF/carrier-label conversion, ZPL template systems, printer fleet integration, and warehouse fulfillment software generally. If your labels don't scan, your printers are a black box, or your fulfillment system needs someone who has shipped this before, the form below reaches me directly.

Get in touch

Plan questions, self-hosted deployments, consulting, or a label that will not scan. Straight answers from the developer; usually a same-day reply.