Install the Print Agent

Why this exists

Browsers don’t expose a “send this PDF to a specific printer” API. The Print Agent fills that gap: it runs a tiny local HTTP listener on port 9988 that BadgeBadger talks to when you click Print. The result is a one-click, no-dialog print, for one badge or a whole batch. Without the agent, each badge opens your browser’s print dialog, and a batch downloads as a PDF you print yourself: usable, but slower.

Windows

1. Open Settings → Printers → One-click printing setup on hq.badgebadger.app and click Download for Windows. (Direct link: GitHub releases.)
2. Choose BadgeBadger.Print.Agent_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe (NSIS installer) or the .msi if your IT department prefers MSI.
3. Run the installer. While a version is new, Windows SmartScreen may show “Windows protected your PC”. Click More info, check that the publisher is Steven Broyer (the installer is signed), then click Run anyway. It installs for you alone, so it doesn’t ask for an admin password.
4. The installer includes SumatraPDF, the small free PDF printer the agent uses to send a card to a specific printer (Windows’s own PDF viewer can’t). There’s nothing else to install.
5. The agent opens when the installer finishes. From then on it starts quietly in the system tray when you sign in to Windows; look for the badger icon.

macOS

1. Open Settings → Printers → One-click printing setup and click Download for Mac, or grab BadgeBadger.Print.Agent_x.y.z_universal.dmg from GitHub releases. One download works on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
2. Open the .dmg and drag BadgeBadger Print Agent onto the Applications folder next to it.
3. Open the app from Applications. macOS asks whether you want to open an app downloaded from the internet; click Open. The agent is signed and notarized by Apple, so that’s the only prompt.
4. PDFs print through CUPS (lp), which is built into macOS, so there’s no extra helper to install.

Choose your badge printer

Do this once the computer is paired (next page) and your card printer’s own driver is installed.

1. Open the agent from the system tray or the Start menu.
2. If it finds a card printer (Zebra, Evolis, Fargo, Magicard and others), it offers Use it for badges. Otherwise click Change next to Badge printer and pick it.
3. Click Test print. A small test card should come out of the printer.

Badges go to that printer unless someone picks a different one in BadgeBadger’s print menu, so there’s no need to change Windows’s default printer.

What the agent does on your machine

• Listens on http://127.0.0.1:9988 for print requests from your browser.
• Enumerates your installed printers and reports them to BadgeBadger so the picker can show them.
• Polls BadgeBadger every couple of seconds for cross-machine print jobs you might have dispatched from a phone or another workstation. Idle-backs off to 30 seconds when nothing’s queued.
• Stores a single 256-bit token on disk to authenticate against the cloud dispatch endpoint. No employee data is stored on the workstation.

Uninstall

Windows: standard Add/Remove Programs. macOS: drag the app from Applications to the Trash. The agent leaves a small token file behind in your app-data directory; you can delete the BadgeBadger folder there too if you want a clean slate.