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Comment by shortstuffsushi | Hacker News Reader

Could you mention what you're likely to be printing? What sort of uses do you have where you write notes in a plain text editor and print them out? I can't think of the last time I printed anything -- actually, I should say I can't think of the last time that I printed anything that wasn't a contract or HR paperwork type of stuff, which is never in plain text. I'm curious what else is still being printed these days. Also, they have plugins for that, if you're interested. You're correct that it's not built in, though.

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I print code reasonably regularly! Makes going through it with a highlighter and red pen to get a sense of what it does and what should be changed quite nice, and it's good to get away from a screen every now and then.

I mostly do it when I'm examining modules in a codebase I'm unfamiliar with.

That's interesting to hear. (Since this is the internet, let me be clear: that's not sarcasm)

Theoretically I really like the idea of reviewing code on paper.

But typically, if I'm trying to familiarize myself with a codebase, we're talking dozens of files. Usually I'm going through three, four, five levels of code to see how a request is served up, and then my search will fan out sideways into even more files as I attempt to see what other processes in the application might affect the data I'm concerned with.

For example with songs I'm in the process of making, I like to have a list on me with just the titles so I can note down acoustic observations made while listening to them on various speakers or headphones, for the next iteration of "mastering". Or little bits of info for my wallet, e.g. when a handwritten thing gets so old that I want to refresh it, then I'd rather make a printout and stick that in there. I like to make "cheat sheets" too, for work stuff or for all sorts of things, which aren't elaborate enough to warrant desktop publishing efforts, just proportional text. Granted, I don't print a lot, but for me it's still some of the very rudimentary things one might do with text.

> Could you mention what you're likely to be printing?

To paper? Never. To PDF? I've printed to pdf to get nice looking formatted code for presentations.

I see print as more a brute force bazooka feature to get nice vector graphics out of apps.

IIRC there's a Sublime plugin (obviously) that supports copy pasting formatted code with syntax highlighting. I definitely remember using it at university. Printing to PDF to get syntax highlighting just sounds like an unnecessary step in between.

What I do:

* c/p in a gist

* when looking at the gist, print the page in your browser

* save to PDF

You may want to a look at https://github.com/mplewis/src2png (it was popular on here at the beginning of the week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15220069)

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