>penguin would shrink the result to fit its screen.
>I declared A5 and Letter paper, media type stationery, and an output bin called face-up.
You can (and should!) define exact dimensions of your screen in `media-size-supported`. It will probably be a non-standard IPP name, that's why you should define that in `media-supported` as `om_NNNmmxYYYmm` or `oe_NNNinxYYYin`
That way you don't need to scale the incoming data, the PC will format it exactly to the dimensions of the screen.
Both PWG Raster and Apple Raster support 1-bit-per-pixel mode (instead of 8-bit-per-pixel you use), that's why the input could be 8 times less in size. Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that. And also tune `urf-supported`'s `W` option, use `W1` for this case.
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)
Oh no, I wasn't, and that's definitely not my comfort zone. I mess with the printers and printing stack due to anger, not because I like it.
It's bugs on bugs, with bugs chasing bugs! So little developers, so complex stack with 25 years of technical debt, and little community around because it's not a sexy technology to be involved in.
That's why I have to dive deep and fix my bugs myself if I want to make it work properly as I would like it to. I also ended up making my own print server device, because China did not make a proper one for some reason for all these years.
This thread made me laugh. I worked on network printing software in Banyan VINES a century or two ago, and my wife always wondered why I hated printing software so much. Everything about the printing software stack, especially in Windows, is terrible.
Very cool. I was expecting to learn about the ins and outs of ink, printheads etc but instead learned "How to build a paper that acts like a printer" which turned out much more entertaining.
This is called a 'plotter', there's a whole community of axi-draw enthusiasts making cool art, for 200 bones you can probably have one on your doorstep tomorrow
One of the great things about having an open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases. Eg, this could be paired with a mobile phone to act as a secondary display much better suited to outdoor applications in bright sunlight.
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
In Linux it's pretty easy to create such things with cups. A while ago I did a cups backend for my Fujitsu Quaderno A4 [1]. It is super useful to be able to just open any document, in any program that supports printing, and then just "print" it to my device.
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.)
> printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.
It's always been a thing: We programmed on paper before we had screen editors, and so early screen editors have always had a way to murder trees on demand:
In vi it's :ha
In emacs it's M-x print-buffer
> It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.
`lp myfile.txt`
I still prefer using hardcopy for reading/debugging.
I used to print a lot of code from Geany, that has some nice support for printing line numbers and code highlights that I have a hard time replicating in other tools.
I think back in the days before office workers that happened to do their work on a computer had access to the ancient relatives of "Microsoft Word"/"Libreoffice Writer", it was pretty normal for printers to take care of plain text files, with about as much fidelity as manual operation of a classic purely mechanical Typewriter.
Since then printers progressively forgot how to cope with such "documents", though IIRC good-old HP "PCL" should only require about a bare minimum of framing/job control to get a modern printer to handle ASCII plain text.
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.
How is that open source? There’s not a single line of code. No CAD. Nothing. Sure, there’s a “coming soon” CrowdSupply link, which I guess is more than a KickStarter. But open source?
Fair enough but I trust CrowdSupply to keep them in check. I bought quite a few projects via CS and never been disappointed. They have too much trust from the community not to follow up, it's their most important differentiator versus KickStarter and other crowdfunding platforms.
Pretty cool work! And it’s nice to see printer discovery works through the standard mDNS!
Regarding the size of the page being sent to the printer, I remember reading that printers used to be postscript interpreters and the result of that program would be the page.
Perhaps that would trade ram for compute, but might be more complex in the end.
I did open the thread and didn't see an actual printer shown except the e-ink device but aside from that, I hate printers buy a cartridge it's empty after 3 prints wtf... now I just go walk into some store like Walgreens to print stuff
For me my favorite is the RM2 but I keep selling/buying it back due to poor financial decisions but I love how it writes and long battery, plus hackable, never paid for a subscription. It is an extra device too so unfortunately not used that often I spend most of my time in front of a desktop but have multiple laptops too/drawing tablets.
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.
I got my laserjet secondhand 10 years ago. It was already 10 years old at this time. It's been low on toner since the beginning but shaking the toner cartridge is usually enough to get usable prints the few times a year I need it (return labels, letters). It's a great, reliable device!
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!
Hm.. I just tried on my Google pixel 7 Pro (obviously very different display - OLED) - and certainly seems like the result of a test conversion pdf2djvu should be at home on an eink screen. Not sure if there's a simple way to test on the only eink I have to hand; a Remarkable.
Fwiw google Gemini cane up with the following to convert pdfs on device in termux after some prodding (koreader can display DjVu):
You'll need access to storage:
termux-setup-storage
Then pipe/paste this to a script:
(Sorry for the verbose slop)
You can just render to the 1bpp text/4bpp images monochrome 300dpi target; perhaps some tone mapping due to the limited contrast ratio of the eink vs. your OLED should be done at rasterization time.
Then just map the resulting 16 brightness levels according to the contrast ratios/progression they have on your eink. Use phone camera and adjust whole image contrast/brightness/black-intensity sliders holding them side by side until the grayscale matches.
Then just pick pixel RGBs from a gray-bars test image you have opened on the remarkable before you took the picture with your pixel 7 pro. Might not easily be done on the phone but can let a python using AI grab those for you. (If it's wrong it'll be obvious or so harmless it doesn't matter anyways.)
Then you take that rasterized-to-1/4-bpp-djvu apply the color palette you just built yourself, and zoom to 300dpi.
Other than the screen backlight which you've taken care of when you held both devices side-by-side and played with the sliders, there's no substantial difference left.
Should be pretty representative.
Don't look with too much of a magnifying glass though the phone doesn't have exactly the same dpi so there are resampling artifacts your eyes resolve if you're too close to it.
Just open pdf on mac, hit print, grab a kindle and there it is (yes, I know, we can do send to kindle, and some time later, when Jeff Bezos allows so, the doc might appear).
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.
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.
> 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.
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 been seeing the Xteink a lot lately. Should I get an X3 or an X4? I don't really know why I want it, but I have an eInk addiction, so I just need it.
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.
You can (and should!) define exact dimensions of your screen in `media-size-supported`. It will probably be a non-standard IPP name, that's why you should define that in `media-supported` as `om_NNNmmxYYYmm` or `oe_NNNinxYYYin`
That way you don't need to scale the incoming data, the PC will format it exactly to the dimensions of the screen.
Both PWG Raster and Apple Raster support 1-bit-per-pixel mode (instead of 8-bit-per-pixel you use), that's why the input could be 8 times less in size. Use `print-color-mode-{supported,default}=bi-level` instead of `monochrome` for that. And also tune `urf-supported`'s `W` option, use `W1` for this case.
The screen/dithering could be ass in 1-bit mode, see https://github.com/OpenPrinting/libcupsfilters/pull/160 where I added more dithering options (Linux-only though, Apple seems to abandon their CUPS).
It's bugs on bugs, with bugs chasing bugs! So little developers, so complex stack with 25 years of technical debt, and little community around because it's not a sexy technology to be involved in.
That's why I have to dive deep and fix my bugs myself if I want to make it work properly as I would like it to. I also ended up making my own print server device, because China did not make a proper one for some reason for all these years.
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.
just put a pen or sharpie on the same mechanism, no?
One of the great things about having an open platform like the Xteink is that it should uncover loads of novel and unsatisfied use cases. Eg, this could be paired with a mobile phone to act as a secondary display much better suited to outdoor applications in bright sunlight.
+1.
And it's worth celebrating the underlying technologies that enable this: ESP32, and RISC-V.
Anyone know what's needed for eink to become cheaper?
[1] https://github.com/cristobaltapia/dpt-rp1-cups
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.)
This one seems to work well: pdconsec.vscode-print
Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pdconsec...
Used to be that printing a text file was just `cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0` .
It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.
It's always been a thing: We programmed on paper before we had screen editors, and so early screen editors have always had a way to murder trees on demand:
In vi it's :ha
In emacs it's M-x print-buffer
> It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.
`lp myfile.txt`
I still prefer using hardcopy for reading/debugging.
Since then printers progressively forgot how to cope with such "documents", though IIRC good-old HP "PCL" should only require about a bare minimum of framing/job control to get a modern printer to handle ASCII plain text.
there's literally ctrl+p shortcut for printing
How is "offline e-reader" handled? Does CUPS retry?
Do you do this outside of your LAN?
https://mattwidmann.net/notes/pen-plotters/
Inkjet is quite difficult but dot matrix printers are easier to find DIY projects of.
Regarding the size of the page being sent to the printer, I remember reading that printers used to be postscript interpreters and the result of that program would be the page.
Perhaps that would trade ram for compute, but might be more complex in the end.
If you like e-ink device reviews this is an artsy channel think small leather notebooks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oOqFUuULOk
For me my favorite is the RM2 but I keep selling/buying it back due to poor financial decisions but I love how it writes and long battery, plus hackable, never paid for a subscription. It is an extra device too so unfortunately not used that often I spend most of my time in front of a desktop but have multiple laptops too/drawing tablets.
https://djvu.sourceforge.net/
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!
Fwiw google Gemini cane up with the following to convert pdfs on device in termux after some prodding (koreader can display DjVu):
You'll need access to storage:
termux-setup-storage
Then pipe/paste this to a script: (Sorry for the verbose slop)
Ed: moved to sibling comment
Then just map the resulting 16 brightness levels according to the contrast ratios/progression they have on your eink. Use phone camera and adjust whole image contrast/brightness/black-intensity sliders holding them side by side until the grayscale matches.
Then just pick pixel RGBs from a gray-bars test image you have opened on the remarkable before you took the picture with your pixel 7 pro. Might not easily be done on the phone but can let a python using AI grab those for you. (If it's wrong it'll be obvious or so harmless it doesn't matter anyways.)
Then you take that rasterized-to-1/4-bpp-djvu apply the color palette you just built yourself, and zoom to 300dpi.
Other than the screen backlight which you've taken care of when you held both devices side-by-side and played with the sliders, there's no substantial difference left. Should be pretty representative. Don't look with too much of a magnifying glass though the phone doesn't have exactly the same dpi so there are resampling artifacts your eyes resolve if you're too close to it.
Just open pdf on mac, hit print, grab a kindle and there it is (yes, I know, we can do send to kindle, and some time later, when Jeff Bezos allows so, the doc might appear).
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.
check page 3. even I was surprised
Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.
The author "prints" to the eink display. Why not load say the pdf directly?
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.
I wonder now what else we've reinvented when it comes to sending data...
> 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.
> Kindles have a ton of RAM, this one didn't.
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.