| Species | Kangaroo Rat |
| Pronouns | He/They |
| Github | https://github.com/cellivar |
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friends`s or of thine own were.
Any man`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
My 3D printer, having heard me speaking praise of it, decided to fail in a new and interesting way. I got several good prints, then it stopped dead in the middle of a large one. This has happened before, so I just rebooted it.
This time though the motors didn't move at all. Several reboots didn't help. I take the case apart and sure enough, a chip has let out the magic smoke that powers the motors.
Guess I'm waiting for a motherboard replacement for a while. Back to messing with 2D printers instead.
I've just found that @html5test is on Mastodon! Niels has put a lot of work into the WebUSB Point of Sale space and I was able to use it as a springboard for some aspects of my code. Most importantly Niels has shipped a very nice little automatic text codepage encoder library: https://github.com/NielsLeenheer/CodepageEncoder
This saved me hours and hours of frustrating effort spent dealing with legacy text encoding schemes and I'm extremely grateful for Niels' work here.
Their other library was a great reference to sanity check myself as I created a different strategy for constructing command documents. Niels' work is a lighter-weight way to build documents for targeted use cases: https://github.com/NielsLeenheer/ThermalPrinterEncoder
My library is meant to be a more one-stop-shop of features and that's the only reason I chose to not directly use Niels' excellent work on the encoder, otherwise it would have saved me even more time :)
Thank you Niels for your pioneering work and sharing it with us all!
Codepage conversion library for obscure codepages supported by thermal printers - GitHub - NielsLeenheer/CodepageEncoder: Codepage conversion library for obscure codepages supported by thermal prin...
And now all of the formatting appears to work correctly! Onto integration.
Attached: 1 image It's taken so much effort to create this receipt. It's hard to overstate how happy I am with this little scrap of paper. The text on the screen is a ReceiptLine document, think markdown but for receipts. My library parses it into ESC/POS commands and prints directly to the printer. No drivers. The webpage itself talks to the printer, I implemented the driver in typescript. There's a demo here: https://cellivar.github.io/WebReceiptLinePrinter/demo/ This is the whole document: ``` ^^^RECEIPT 12/18/2021, 11:22:33 AM Asparagus | 1| 1.00 Broccoli | 2| 2.00 Carrot | 3| 3.00 - ^TOTAL | ^6.00 = ``` ReceiptLine is a somewhat obscure standard developed a few years back in Japan. The major receipt printer companies collaborated on it. The idea was to have a standard that the various printers could interoperate with to some degree. I lifted some of my parser from that project. https://github.com/receiptline/receiptline Now some of you might reasonably ask "Cellivar why would you write a printer driver in TypeScript?" and the answer is easy: Chromebooks.
Our team now has:
* Chromebooks
* Barcode Scanners
* Label Printers
* Receipt Printers
which is enough to run registration and con store services at fur cons. Or fundraisers. Or a donation drive. And this is the beginning.
We're building a self-sustaining library of equipment nonprofits need to further their causes.
Ninji
Tilde Lowengrimm