Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

Post by hawski » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 7:09 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #104

hawski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer) I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and emulate…

Huh, my first thought was that it ought to be somewhat mechanically obvious if the printer supports double sided printing. But now I’m thinking, some printers do just magically suck the paper back in for the second side, right? And I’m wondering if my printer might secretly support double sided printing as well.

Post by aschmelyun » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

hansonkd wrote: post #21

I did something similar with a receipt printer. a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of…

Post by smartmic » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

ale42 wrote: post #6

Matrix printers can actually do quite a lot... depending on the models, you can change fonts, use bold, underline, sometimes italic, double-width and double-height characters and even graphics (although often are relatively low resolutions like 90 or 180 DPI). One funny thing I did once for a escape-room-like game, was a box with only a parallel printer connector on it. When connected to the printer, it was parasite-…

Post by freetanga » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #50

hawski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer) I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and emulate…

IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has been available on Linux for even longer. I would be surprised if the feature was not available on Linux for your printer. Edit: added footnote 1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019

Post by jabroni_salad » Fri, Oct 04, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

Instantnoodl wrote: post #87

mtoohig wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share some of your code, I would like to see and get a feel for some personal ideas.

I use Thermal Printer for a different use-case (TTRPG stuff). Feel free to check it out :) https://github.com/BigJk/snd