OT: someone please make a RPi image that "prints" a page to an eink display. I want to duct-tape an RPi Zero and a rechargeable battery to the back of a display, then be able to print recipes to it while cooking. Other people might print board-game rules or speech notes while rehearsing -- anything that you'd typically print and then throw away after brief usage.
I know I could make a PDF, sideload it to a Kindle, etc. Too many steps. I just want the display to appear as a printer on my phone.
Ugh, I don't have it. It was from before I used git.
Basically to do this you have a cups server that exposes itself as a network printer that prints to a specified PDF directory and then you have a program watching that directory for new files and if there's a new one it opens up whatever pdf viewer you want in full screen.
We need more things like this. I know people don't like Windows Server because it is not open source, but it is simple to use and get up and running. Also, user management is easy.
I don't like Microsoft products, such as Windows, because I used them through out the years and find all the edge cases where they don't hold up. Windows OS is too fragile with their kludge of internal designs. Corrupt registry or WMI repository bakes systems with ease. This has nothing to do with Open Source.
OSes that use plain text configuration files are easy to resurrect. Windows is fixed with reinstall the OS. Linux and BSD are fixed with editing a config file or reinstalling a single corrupt application / library.
Example of bad versus good design is DirectX shader compilation. Windows can only perform this while the game is running. Linux with WINE can perform this without the game running. Windows will have bad FPS during the first run / scene with many games because of this.
PS. Windows print system is really bad in the industrial environment because they do not follow label markup language stands. Number of label DSLs have a print quantity setting to save memory. Want 1000 copies printed, one print job with print quantity set to 1000. Windows spools up 1000 copies of the label and sends each to the printer. This eats up the memory on printers in no time. It also brakes the ability to clear the print queue just on the printer. Extra steps require the Windows print job to be canceled and they the printer's queue to be cleared. Otherwise The printer will receive the next 990 of the 1000 print job.
Short answer is you not familiar with Windows but quite good with Linux. Hence the "not like" part. Plenty of Windows developers I know (that is way more than Linux developers statiscally) love Windows. The apps they designed and built simply way better or even non existent on Linux. The same reason too for them, they don't know Linux and near God-level tier with Windows from MFC to assembbly.
Looks like it is .NET Framework, so there is possibility to port it to .net core and possibly use via dll or .so as library inside other, linux desktop framework (or in something more portable like Flutter).
This is an incredible idea! I really like it because it sounds so obvious after being exposed to it but I never thought of it before! I wonder what other ways we could integrate GPT's, LLM's, and other AI into the simple "Print" functionality across all our devices.
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But, also, wow! Windows-only and AGPLv3 is not a combination I think I've ever seen before.
I know I could make a PDF, sideload it to a Kindle, etc. Too many steps. I just want the display to appear as a printer on my phone.
Basically to do this you have a cups server that exposes itself as a network printer that prints to a specified PDF directory and then you have a program watching that directory for new files and if there's a new one it opens up whatever pdf viewer you want in full screen.
Setup a shared pdf printer: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1310867/how-to-set-up-shared...
OSes that use plain text configuration files are easy to resurrect. Windows is fixed with reinstall the OS. Linux and BSD are fixed with editing a config file or reinstalling a single corrupt application / library.
Example of bad versus good design is DirectX shader compilation. Windows can only perform this while the game is running. Linux with WINE can perform this without the game running. Windows will have bad FPS during the first run / scene with many games because of this.
PS. Windows print system is really bad in the industrial environment because they do not follow label markup language stands. Number of label DSLs have a print quantity setting to save memory. Want 1000 copies printed, one print job with print quantity set to 1000. Windows spools up 1000 copies of the label and sends each to the printer. This eats up the memory on printers in no time. It also brakes the ability to clear the print queue just on the printer. Extra steps require the Windows print job to be canceled and they the printer's queue to be cleared. Otherwise The printer will receive the next 990 of the 1000 print job.
Abandonware.
In theory you could maintain code paths for both, offering a slimmer package for Windows 10+, but that'd also cost more time and effort to maintain.
Also, not many people know Windows comes with an OCR API. It's extremely underused in my opinion.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
edit: and goes deep into COM for device interfaces. Wow! blast from the past.
Of course, CUPS based printing has had built in print to PDF for years...
[1] Common Unix Printing System