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)

> Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that

The last time I checked (a year ago), 1bpp was suddenly supported only by Windows. IIRC, monochrome is REQUIRED, while bi-level is OPTIONAL in RFC.

Not sure how things stand now, though. Ever since then, I've just been carrying Floyd–Steinberg dithering around.

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

My 10 year old mono laser printer requires a cartridge very two years or so. This is despite being a lot more heavily used than the average domestic printer.

Wanted ideas on how to build an ink printer that is untraceable. For privacy reasons.

glad you liked it!

working on an daily life ePub generator (because I want to stick to CrossPoint) with the opposite goal, namely use the phone as little as possible, but I admit I would also like to tinker with an additional temporary display, at least for typing

And then maybe different pages become a slideshow.

yes!!

> 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.)

I have had a daisy wheel printer project on the back burner for a while. They where never sold much where I live or are just very difficult to come by in usable condition. Figured it would be doable to create with a 3d printer and some simple electronics.

Inkjet is quite difficult but dot matrix printers are easier to find DIY projects of.

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

As far as I can remember, framework has this still on their schedule. So sooner or later you maybe can at least have a well maintainable one.

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

Just like print-to-pdf is (one of many) peeves of adobe's

For fast updates / high frame rate, especially also smooth fade from previous to next page, those displays only do black/white. They can typically modulate about 14 levels of gray in-between but reliably (without really bad ghosting, due to strong temperature sensitivity of the pixel's transition response and the display being static so all gray has to be done by carefully interrupting a transition part way through) only from a nice flash-to-black -> flash-to-white -> fade-to-target-greyscale (sometimes one or two alternating full contrast flashes prepended to more intensely equalize the pixels/erase ghosting, but should only be needed every couple dozen page flips in grayscale mode).

I think the nice b/w no-flicker fade transitions chop the transitioning of all changing pixels into small burst/chunks and interleave/alternate the chunks of white-to-black with the chunks of black-to-white, so it's perceptually simultaneous. Or it's actually pulling off some kind of tri-state driving leaving unchanging pixels alone and pulling those that change to either plus or minus polarity depending on what transition direction they are supposed to go in... Sadly IIRC all quite proprietary-gated :(

What that means for djvu is that at least for text-only content on those readers that manage the 300 dpi "threshold" you'd just rasterize to pure 300dpi black/white (1 bit per pixel) comparable to a 300dpi "don't skimp on toner but don't you dare take half a second longer than you must in order to make the text crisp enough for $reader to have no good reason to whine about it being not crisp enough" laser printer job.

Djvu is particularly for displays with more than about 5bits of grayscale as well as for lossy compression of grayscale/color scans. And maybe also some efficiency gains on 1-bit-per-pixel quantized scans, but those aren't usually the target content for these readers, IMO. Might want to try for them, though!

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

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.

CrossPoint at least only support ePub and BMP so they could have printed to a directory of BMPs.

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

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.

I'd like my e-reader to show up as a printer, and when I print something on it it actually gets saved as a pdf on the reader. Like in the article, but multi-page pdf.

I often do 'print to A5 pdf => copy pdf to e-reader'. Would be nice to do that in one step from any program that can print.

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.

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.