zlacker

>>pangor+(OP)
I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market with a lot of legacy. For most of us, a printer is something for home photos, some documents, and so, but that's only a little part of the cake: the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc.

Once that is said, it should be possible to work in a general-purpose open source 2d printer. The open community has achieved bigger goals. The biggest problem I can see is the entry barrier: to get a very basic printer, you have to invest thousands of time with a lot of knowledge in different areas, when a basic printer, even from the large companies, is not very expensive.

I think that one of the only chances we have for that to happen is that a company frees its designs and patents and community starts working from there.

>>lpfabi+C2
I had a burst of creative thought, thinking about getting a typewriter and hooking up a ton of actuators to it so I could just slide it an array of a document to type out. But it'd probably move to fast or slow, jam and then there's feeding it paper.

It'd probably be easier to make a nice block alphabet for a plotter and then just print your documents as biro drawings.

But again, feeding paper seems like a very fiddly problem.

>>gonzo4+wr
I remember it well. All of us computer hackers back in the late 1970s did something like that with a bunch of solenoids. It worked, but you got about 12 cps on a good day, and only constant width fonts. Also, if one of your solenoids was a bit sluggish it would throw off the registration of some of the characters. The advent of daisy wheel technology killed off the Selectric printers. Remember daisy wheels, especially the early metal ones??

OTOH hacking an IBM Executive might have been something. Proportional spacing!! (but a much fiddlier mechanism)

>>vekell+VA
I have a vague memory that there was even a commercial option for that--a device that fit over the typewriter keyboard, that you could buy, and it would drive the typewriter from the computer.

I had for a while a NEC Spinwriter--loud, slow, built like the proverbial tank. My recollection--it's been more than 30 years since I used it--was that it did support proportional spacing.