this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 13 points 11 hours ago

Ohh God ... That's a very, very tall order.

You wouldn't think that it's that complicated. I worked in a print-on-demand house for about 5 years, The amount of black magic fuckery that goes on between streaming data into that driver and getting stuff on the page is absolutely insane.

You're standing on the backs of like 40 years of trade secrets and poorly implemented protocols at half-assed feature sets.

And then the worst part is, HP is spent the last 20 years making the printer cheaper. Most of the inkjets don't even have steppers anymore, just DC motors and a resistive feedback ribbon.

Developing a multi-platform certified signed driver would be a pretty decent hurdle as well.

Can't we just stop printing? Change things over to black and white thermal when we really need something that's pretty easy to do.