I've not much to say on the thermal printer part of this but the extensions they did to markdown are great. They had me double taking for a few seconds thinking they might be real markdown because they make so much sense.
[align=center] Center-align the following text (also left, right)
[qr=https://...] Generate and print a QR code
It’s funny, after all the work that was done to decouple content from presentation, 90% of the markup I’ve seen in every codebase this decade is using Styled Components anyway, which commingles them in the source code anyway.
I think this further proves that the hypothesis of decoupling content from presentation is flawed. The question is how many more data points do we need before we admit that?
Oh man... the popularity of the tailwind css framework. I have big-o Opinions on that, but screw it, if it helps people get things done quickly, then I'm all for it. The semantic xml/html dweebs set us back a solid decade.
Since align is only deprecated and not removed, and Markdown is a superset of HTML (at least for CommonMark and GFM), it would be valid markdown to just use <div align=center> to center text (not like there's such a thing as invalid Markdown)
I actually use my printers thank you very much. Even bought one of those bank teller slip printer things and a few boxes check-sized slips. I use them for time tracking and todo list.
I didn't go totally crazy, though, and stopped before getting too deep into "...and then OCR them using the check scanner" because I remembered I was already keeping track of start/stop times in a database when printing the slips.
Can you share more about this workflow? I have only recently started to appreciate how my special blend of adhd can work best with there's a physical component to actually _seeing_ the work to be done vs stashed away in a jira, exclusively.
The TL;DR is that it's a physical kanban board mixed with a time clock.
I place them on a ticket rack hanging on the wall above my monitor. It like the ones you see at restaurants... extruded aluminum... filled with marbles... slot on the bottom. If my board is full, I can't (or at least shouldn't) accept more work. It also is an immediate reminder of what needs to be done. The physical process of marking a ticket done and putting it in the finished pile helps to satisfy that need to have a visible sign that work has been done.
This comes so timely. I bought the receipt printer last week and a large metal sheet to hold them magnetically to the wall for a real life todo kanban board
This rules! I've been working on a similar project where friends DM a discord bot and it prints out a "fax" on my thermal printer.
One thing I solved differently: I rendered the fax as an image using PIL and then I just print the image. That way I can support arbitrary Unicode and can lay things out independently of what my printer is capable of.
I had started working on something similar a few months back but as a collection of CLI utilities.
The first was a todo list printer where the todos are written in a YAML file.
It includes fields for the name of the list and the date.
I also started working on a Sudoku printer (which I think is only possible on 80mm paper).
But I completely forgot about the entire thing after coming back from vacation.
You've inspired be to get back to working on it :D
As an aside, are there any good recommendations for a wifi/bluetooth printer using 80mm paper that doesn't break the bank? I initially bought the Munbyn ITPP098P but it being USB only is a bit unergonomic.
Already replied the same in another comment, but I recently got the "YHD-8390" on Aliexpress for around 100$ - has wifi, usb, ethernet, and works pretty well.
these things seem like too much fun, someone made a gleam printer library (https://hexdocs.pm/escpos/) and suddenly everyone on the discord is buying a printer...
I troubleshoot thermal printers for work and the error is rarely in the hardware. I have no issue with this work request; TPs are deterministic and predictable.
its slower than text mode. basically you can print anything as long as you can convert it to monochrome bitmap before sending. But the thermal printers have anotehr mode which prints extremely fast if your data is textual with rudimentary formatting like order slips.
I believe the speed also depends on how many activated dots there are per line in the image, as thermal print heads often have a limit to the number of elements that can be activated at once.
