Also, it would be great to embed a pagebreak in the ZPL editor so that when you print your macro you can force a new page at a desired point, like before subroutines.

I feel like I’m talking to myself…

Also, it would be great if you could use escape characters like \n for newline, \tab for next tab stop. Example

PRINT “column 1\tcolumn2\tcolumn 3\n\n\n”

PRINT data1, “\t”, data2, “\t”, data3,

would print three column headings at exact locations with the data exactly underneath, and three blank lines between the header and the data.

Hey Mark, 

You’re definitely correct (and not talking to yourself) but I feel like I’ve been making the argument to improve the ZPL editor for years and now I just feel hopeless 😪.

Based on the “Additional Copyright Information”, I believe the ZPL editor is actually the open source AvalonEdit for WPF:

AvalonEdit by icsharpcode

So, anything AvalonEdit can do (code folding, automatic indent, code completion, /// documentation, find/replace all, etc) the ZPL editor can theoretically do.  Although Notepad++ doesn’t use AvalonEdit (Notepad++ is written in C++), basically anything Notepad++ can do AvalonEdit can probably also do.

I’m not sure about that the pagebreak though since this is primarily a Word concept and not a generic text editor concept.

As for the \n and \tab, it’s not a good solution but you can use $TAB() and $NEWLINE() string functions to achieve this:

PRINT "column 1", $TAB(), "column2", $TAB(), "column 3", $NEWLINE(), $NEWLINE(), $NEWLINE()

PRINT data1, $TAB(), data2, $TAB(), data3,

Oh! $TAB()! Thank you!

BTW, one benefit of using $TAB() to provide spacing between data items if that when you copy and paste into excel, each data item goes into a unique cell.