Every restaurant that opens outside China and outside the Latin alphabet hits this in the first week. The screen looks perfect. The kitchen ticket comes out as ▯▯▯▯▯. Somebody suggests changing the font, which does nothing, and then somebody suggests buying a different printer, which usually does nothing either.
Why it happens
A thermal receipt printer is not a computer screen. It carries a small built-in font table — usually Latin, often Chinese, sometimes a code page or two more — and it prints only what is in that table. Send it a Khmer syllable, a Thai vowel mark, a Burmese stacked consonant or a currency symbol like ₭ or ₦ that the table has never heard of, and it prints its placeholder: a box.
So the character never reached the paper as a character. Changing the software font changes what you see on screen and nothing about what the printer can render.
The fix: stop sending text
MiYaDine renders the affected lines as a bitmap before they go to the printer. The dish name, the currency symbol, the whole line if necessary, is drawn as a picture on the computer side, and the printer is asked to print a picture — something every thermal printer can do regardless of its font table. The result comes out readable because the printer was never asked to recognise the script in the first place.
This runs automatically for non-Chinese text and for special currency symbols. You do not tick a box per dish.
What this does and does not solve
It solves scripts and symbols: Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Lao, Vietnamese with full diacritics, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and currency marks such as ₭, ฿, ₩, ₦, R$ and €.
It does not solve a printer that is simply out of paper contact, printing faint, or wired at the wrong baud rate — those look different (faded or scrambled Latin text, not clean boxes). And it does not change the fact that image printing is marginally slower per line than character printing; on an 80mm receipt at a busy counter you will not notice, but it is the honest trade.
If you already own printers, send us the exact models before you count on them. Most standard thermal printers behave; a few unusual ones do not, and we would rather check than have you find out during a Friday service. See what hardware a restaurant actually needs.
