Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapia | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://github.com/cristobaltapia/dpt-rp1-cups

View on HN

> any program that supports printing

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.)

LOL. TIL you can’t print from VSCode.

printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

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.

> 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 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 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.

> printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

there's literally ctrl+p shortcut for printing

TextEdit.app supports printing, so does Notepad.exe (unless they removed that recently).

I've done the same from a raspberry pi to a receipt printer, just piping to lp0

Fairly sure you can netcat asci on port 9100 to HP Jet Direct printers still.

vim/nvim at least have :print

Edit:

This one seems to work well: pdconsec.vscode-print

Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pdconsec...

And of course it just renders an HTML document (applies some CSS to the text content) and then uses the embedded browser's printing.

Or Obsidian

Xcode should have printing capabilities. 26.6 does on my system anyway.

You're right. I mis-remembered it.

I see that it applies styles to markdown documents, but keeps all formatting characters visible (e.g. # for titles). I guess I wasn't happy with that and looked for another solution.

That is much fewer LoC than I expected.

How is "offline e-reader" handled? Does CUPS retry?

Do you do this outside of your LAN?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com