How to build a printer

This is why I like it here. Somebody does irrefutably incredible work outside of their comfort zone, and somebody else goes "yeah actually I was born in that zone. Moulded by it. Here's how to improve it" (in a positive way)

lovely, this would save me a bunch of memory during transformation and dithering. Will do!

glad you liked it!

> any program that supports printing

Unfortunately printing support seems to go out of fashion, at least in macOS land.

Lately I needed a quick printout of a markdown document. I could have used TextEdit for the raw text, but I wanted the styling too. Learned that neither VSCode, Xcode nor Obsidian can print. (There is a community plugin for Obsidian.)

If a DIY plotter would do, this site has a long list of different projects

https://mattwidmann.net/notes/pen-plotters/

I'd say it's an eco-friendly printer

There is an open source one https://www.opentools.studio

if it looks like a paper, it should act like a paper

I've wanted something like this for a long time to print recipes that I'm about to cook. I don't want my phone in the kitchen getting gunk on it, so I'll usually print on paper, get the gunk on the paper, and then throw it out.

I'm not going to create a recipe PDF and load it on an e-reader. That's too much work. But I will happily press control-P on a recipe web page and select the eink display as the target.

From the 4th line in the article:

> But getting stuff onto it was tedious. I had to join its hotspot and open a little upload website in my browser. Yuck.

Anyway, very creative, I like the idea a lot.

> I was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold.

> Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.

PDF is very, very complicated standard which can't be handled properly on tiny MCUs with reasonable performance and spec conformance:

    - 4 font formats
    - 9 image formats
    - blending with transparency
    - different colorspaces, each image could use its own on the page
    - different dithering algorithms, each image with its own
    - the page can have elements from another pages (global elements)

This is only a small part from the top of my head.

Common simple home printers absolutely should not accept regular PDF as an input: thanks to Apple and IETF we now have Apple Raster and PWG Raster for printers, as a part of AirPrint and IPP Everywhere/Mopria driverless printing standards, which are very similar but have slightly different options and headers. It's a simple raster input for printers specifically.

Some companies, such as HP, invented a "raster PDF": PCLm / PCLms. Don't be confused by the name, it's a regular standard-conforming PDF which contain nothing but a full-page JPEG on each page, and don't use any other features. It's created only to be able to open "printed page" (driver output) in a standard PDF viewer on a PC for debugging or business logging needs, but otherwise it's like a regular JPEG with additional per-page metadata.

I was thinking of this, but rendering PDF takes a lot out of a 400KB RAM'd device. It also needs a ton of things to actually work which the ROM can't hold.

Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.

Probably not. It doesn't appear to have enough ram. I'm not sure the CPU is up to that either.

Thanks. It's rough around the edges, so PRs are open, and there's a recipe in the repo if you want to build your own apps.

Wow!! I didn't think of that.

I've owned all of them and the answer is the X4 Pro IMO. It has a backlight, which is the only thing I really missed on the others.

It's funny that X3 is a successor of X4. Only downside is that X4 has a USB-C port and X3 doesn't

I bought an x4 a month or so ago, zero regrets. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s finally been the thing to actually decouple me from my phone. Whenever I’m out and about, bored, I just slide it out and pick up where I left off reading last. It’s a nicer reading experience on my kobo but the portability and.. frankly charm just can’t be beat.