Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I thought about doing something like this so I could turn the tickets I work on into paper tickets but never quite got around to it.

(I did buy a cheap receipt printer on eBay though and managed to burn it out in the first 10 minutes of printing. ProTip: a receipt printer with the width specified in inches is likely to be a quality printer by a reputable manufacturer, one specified in mm is likely to be a piece of junk from China.)

Adding a QR code would help a lot in terms of making a cyber-physical object where you could close the ticket by pointing at it...

View on HN

What’s the reason behind the inches vs millimeters distinction? I understand it’s just a heuristic but I don’t get what the underlying cause is.

english == Made in America; Quality. metric == Chinese; Piece of crap

is the intention I think. Not a fair distinction imho, but to each their own.

I've had a few crap Chinese receipt printers. I do appreciate that they print Chinese characters because I print a lot of anime fan art and art reproductions of 19th century Japanese prints and like to put as much kanji as I can on the back sides. On the other hand other than some official Pokemon art that renders beautifully on thermal printers because it was thought through like the Ansel Adams Zone System

https://safebooru.donmai.us/posts/2477177

I do almost all this work with inkjet printers and rasterize it all myself.

(I wrote my own text rendering engine for vertical CJK text, not because I was unhappy with the results I got printing characters with uniformly square metrics but because I wanted western characters and dingbats I introduced to look good. Sooner or later I'll probably write my own text rendering engine for horizontal roman text because I haven't met a kerning engine I really like and because there are many typographical details like ordinals (e.g. 5ᵗʰ) that I'd like to have better control of.)

I am buying these off eBay in the United States. English units might mean "culturally sensitive" which is a tracer for quality.

A Zebra or NCR sold in the US will be marketed with English units, the same printer is probably marketed in the E.U. with metric units.

The people selling the off brand printer might not know or could care less what units are used in the area it is being marketed in, which is a tracer for them not caring about any other quality attributes of the product.

English Units? How many barleycorn wide does it print? And how many wapentake (that's 20 knights fees) did you pay?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com