Stylized image binning algorithm, for the web | Hacker News Reader

Stylized image binning algorithm, for the web

benjdd.com

57 pointsbddicken14 comments

Reminds me of this tool I used 20 years ago to generate giant halftone posters for my dorm room walls: https://rasterbator.net/

Thanks so much for sharing this. When I was 1yo (in the 1970s), my parents took me to Sears (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears) and had a "computer portrait" generated which looks like what you've done. They were so intrigued by this highly pixelated portrait, they had it on the wall almost 20yrs. It seems so commodity now, but these things were true novelties 40ish years ago.

You are welcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone

But how do one create half-tone images which can print to a laser printer? Whenever I try, the printer itself adds its own toning.

I just want to print an image where a black dot is exactly a black dot, not "fuzzed" by the printer.

try a pen plotter?

you can't, it's a laser printer.

if it's black-and-white specifically, you may be able to improve slightly by switching to black-and-white mode.

but if you want to design your own halftones, you need to be using a spot color process

I mean... why can't I. The printer is obviously capable of printing such patterns.

The why is that you haven't reverse-engineered the printer internals and modified it to give you fine-grained low-level control over the printing process.

If I made a font with dots it would obviously work, no reverse engineering needed.

Have you looked at the printer's advanced properties dialog? (Assuming these are still a thing?) I haven't owned a printer in years but my last one (some kind of Epson) had options to control the half-toning.

Maybe try feeding it a vector instead of a raster then

Not sure how to feed a vector short of doing raw PostScript.

PDF is, or at least can be, a vector format. Or go for PostScript. EPS is a perfectly respectable format as well.

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