Printing | Getting Started

Shiny ships two printing models, because a receipt printer and an office printer are not the same problem.

GitHub
Thermal
Native

Frameworks

.NET MAUI

.NET

Blazor

Operating Systems

Android

iOS

Windows

Linux

macOS

Which one do I want?

You have	Use	What happens
A 58/80mm receipt, kitchen or label printer	Thermal printing - Shiny.Printers	You build a PrintDocument; an encoder turns it into ESC/POS (or TSPL) bytes; a transport - Bluetooth LE, TCP or a browser API - streams them to the device. Your app owns the layout; there is no driver.
Any printer the OS already knows about - AirPrint, laser, inkjet, a CUPS queue	Native printing - Shiny.Printing	You hand a PDF, image, HTML or file to the OS print pipeline - its dialog, spooler and driver.

They meet in one place: Shiny.Printing.Rendering renders a thermal PrintDocument to a PDF, so the very same receipt can go to either kind of printer.

Packages

Package	Platforms	What it does
Shiny.Printers	any .NET	The document model, PrinterCapabilities, the EscPosProtocol and TsplProtocol encoders and PrinterImage. No dependencies; AOT and trim clean.
Shiny.Printers.BluetoothLE	iOS, Mac Catalyst, macOS, Android, Windows, Linux	Scan for and connect to BLE printers through Shiny.BluetoothLE, with MTU-chunked writes.
Shiny.Printers.Network	everywhere, including Blazor Server	Raw TCP to port 9100 (JetDirect), and mDNS discovery through Shiny.Net.Discovery.
Shiny.Printers.Blazor	Blazor WebAssembly / Server	Web Bluetooth, Web Serial and WebUSB transports.
Shiny.Printing	iOS, Mac Catalyst, Android, Windows, Linux, macOS	IPrintService over AirPrint, PrintManager, GDI+ / shell and CUPS.
Shiny.Printing.Rendering	any .NET	Renders a PrintDocument to PDF with SkiaSharp.
Shiny.Printing.Blazor	Blazor WebAssembly / Server	IPrintService over the browser’s window.print().

Quick start

MauiProgram.cs

builder.Services.AddBluetoothLePrinting();     // BLE receipt printers - registers Shiny.BluetoothLE too
builder.Services.AddNetworkPrinting();         // WiFi receipt printers - registers mDNS discovery too
builder.Services.AddNativePrinting();          // the platform IPrintService
builder.Services.AddPrintDocumentRendering();  // optional: receipt -> PDF

public class Checkout(IPrinterScanner scanner, BlePrinterManager printers)
{
    public async Task PrintReceipt()
    {
        var found = await scanner.Scan().Take(1).Timeout(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(15)).ToTask();
        var printer = await printers.Connect(found);
        try
        {
            var caps = printer.Capabilities;
            var doc = new PrintDocument()
                .AlignCenter().Bold().Size(2, 2).Line("SHINY MART").ResetStyle()
                .AlignLeft().Line(new string('-', caps.CharactersPerLine))
                .Line("Coffee            $3.50")
                .AlignCenter().QrCode("https://shinylib.net")
                .Feed(2);

            if (caps.SupportsCut)
                doc.Cut();

            await printer.Print(doc);
        }
        finally
        {
            (printer as IDisposable)?.Dispose();   // disconnects
        }
    }
}

Every Add* extension lives in the Shiny namespace. Before running on a device, work through Platform Setup - iOS in particular silently returns no network printers without its Info.plist entries.

Samples

The client repository’s samples include both pages: Thermal Printer (BLE + WiFi scan, connect by address, print a receipt with a logo, barcode and QR code) and Native Print (render that receipt to PDF, print HTML, list printers and print silently where the OS allows it), in Sample.Shared.Maui for every MAUI head and Linux, plus a Printing page in Sample.Blazor for the browser transports.