Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

aschmelyun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 259 posts

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#71

Post by pm215 »

whartung wrote: post #29

So, curiosity today. One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0. Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed. Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the…

Back when I was at school in the 1990s, there was a dot matrix printer in the computer room still, which was the default printer for any of the computers on the network. One of the classic user errors was that somebody would try to print a document from Word and it would send a load of PostScript to the dot matrix printer, which would dutifully print it all out as PostScript source, wasting paper and printer ribbon until somebody told the printer to stop...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#72

Post by bitwize »

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-…

Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a simple markup language.

It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s.

Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#73

Post by alchemist1e9 »

rbanffy wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.

> I can't afford a proper ASR-33

If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find one?

Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn’t produced anything in years.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#74

Post by PaulHoule »

ustad wrote: post #36
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…

Whats the printer you have? I’ve been thinking of getting one and did not know about the notification and external feature you mention.

There are a lot of cheap Chinese dot matrix printers. As an American if you search by mm size you will find those, if you search by inches you will find more reputable (and culturally sensitive) brands.

I bought two Chinese printers, one burned up pretty quick when I was testing it but I might have been printing too much black. The other is fine I think but really I am not so motivated to make thermal prints when I have a good quality inkjet. (My best thermal print was a small Lusamine

https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741

which demonstrates how Nintendo official art is designed to render on cheap screens like the Nintendo 3DS)

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#75

Post by ssl-3 »

mmmlinux wrote: post #63
zzo38computer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire. It would be possible to write a PostScript program that emulates ESC/P (or PCL), although then you would have to send an entire page (or a page break) before the page would be printed, unlike the old dot-matrix line printers that you can print one line at a…

Its not like a laser printer can really print line by line though.

An old HP laser printer will buffer plain text line-by-line, and will print a page once the last line is buffered.

That buffer could have several random programs' outputs in it, all just dumped as simply as possible to /dev/lp0 (or lpt1 or whatever), and it works.

A LaserWriter can't do these things.

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#78

Post by daggersandscars »

hawski wrote: post #47
slsii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d , and find the name through lpstat -p. And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.

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…

Are you using Brother's Linux printer driver for your device? If not, I'd start there.

https://support.brother.com/g/b/midlink_productcategory.aspx...

Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

#80

Post by aschmelyun »

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-…

I’ve been wanting to explore more with this design-wise. There’s literally dozens of pages in the manual regarding font sizing, emphasis, italics, sub and superscripts, etc.

Maybe for version 2.0!

Post reply on HN