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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Are you supposed to customize the letter plate in your slicer before printing? The default plates in the zipfile don't seem well designed for a traditional movable type system. It's 13 full copies of the alphabet, and 3 lines of the most common characters, but even that leaves you with an abundance of X, Z, K, etc... and a relatively modest number of vowels. There doesn't appear to be any capital letters either.

I'm also confused as to the purpose of the "plates stl" directory that has many seemingly very similar blank plates. The "how to make plates" documentation is all about building custom graphical plates.

Amusingly, my slicer is estimating that it would take 28 hours to print the letters and spacers.

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3d printing an entire custom graphical plate with text already on it seems more practical in production terms, although of course you would be limited in design terms by the resolution of what you could get out of your printer.

It would be interesting to do 4-color printing on this as well - obviously you would not have fine enough resolution to do a true "screen" but you could do what amount to multicolor woodcuts. Wonder how good the "reproducibility" is, in terms of ensuring that the paper is always accurately aligned/etc. Part of the charm though, I suppose.

Perhaps you could do the block-printing equivalent of "ascii art" and use some pre-printed blocksets which don't correspond to actual characters, but which could be arranged to print some approximation of an image.

Or just ascii art itself although these blocks appear to be fairly big for that.

Pretty neat and fun little idea.

If you used reusable plates as a base - basically a removable 3D printer bed plate - and just printed the raised parts for a plate directly onto it, that would seem like a pretty quick, filament-light way to produce plates that could be used to run off a few copies, before scraping the filament traces off and printing another plate.

I wonder how few layers you could get down to and produce decent results?

You could probably do pretty well with a resin printer. This seems particularly well suited for it

The letters and spacers 3D-print as individual pieces. Rearrange them to form your message and slide them onto rods that snap into the body frame.

With the supplied letters and spacers as examples, render the font of your choice as additional models to 3D-print.

It makes more sense to me to just print a whole plate rather than individual letters. Wasteful, but compared to the normal printing process, really not that wasteful.

Really? That would mean you’d need a plate for every single page. I feel like that would blow through filament.

You can print them pretty thin.

Or maybe print something more ephemeral like how a mimeograph works (or maybe even silk screen)

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