Accessing USB Receipt Printers

Question

I'm trying to print directly to a USB Receipt Printer from a WinRT app on Surface 2 (Windows 8.1 ARM.)
I've tried the old RawPrinterHelper trick to send bytes via the "winspool.drv" but I guess that route is blocked now as print jobs generate Error 372 on Surface. Looking at how much Surface is locked down I didn't see much point in investigating
USBPrint.sys.
I've looked into Windows.Devices.Usb but the documentation explicitly states this is not to be used for certain classes of device of which printers are one.
There is some support for POS solutions in WinRT apps as there's code in there for Bar Code Scanners and Magstripe readers but nothing for line printers.
How exactly is one supposed to print bills and receipts with no access to a printer? And no, the page based system for document printing doesn't count :) Am I reduced to wasting my clients' money on unnecessary Ethernet receipt printers?!
Best Regards,
Andy

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply but I looked at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/dn263144
Which says:
Do not use the namespace for these USB device classes:
Note  Instead, use other relevant APIs. These USB device classes are blocked by the namespace to prevent conflict with other APIs. For example, if your device conforms to HID protocol, use Windows.Devices.HumanInterfaceDevice.
Audio class (0x01)
HID class(0x03)
Image class (0x06)
Printer class (0x07)
Mass storage class (0x08)
Smart card class (0x0B)
Audio/video class (0x10)
Wireless controller (such as, wireless USB host/hub) (0xE0)
And unfortunately my printers do actually declare themselves as printers :)
As you stated, there is no API available for receipt printers so we're in Catch-22 land :(
Two major problems I see:
1) I respect ambition: if someone at Microsoft were to think "let's own every market!" for a change you'd have the whole Point of Sale market sewn up! Seriously though, Point of Sale has seen the value of touch screen interfaces for decades. Now everyone
else has caught up, clients are expecting tablets to also be Point of Sales systems. They are getting very bored of the minor technical and marketing reasons why this can't happen.
2) How does one do the age old task of firmware updates? Forget receipt printing or line printers for the moment. How does HP, Dell, Lexmark, et al perform a firmware update of one of their models on Windows 8.1? I can't see how it's possible.
Of course, if there's some way to achieve this by writing a custom printer driver or any other cunning but legal method of bypassing the security restrictions I'd love to know!
Best Regards,
Andy