Re:Writing a printer driver in JavaScript
by eyelidlessness on Thursday February 03, 2022 @09:14PM
(#30201992)
Heck, if:
- you can target PDF
- you’re married to a JS stack
- your motivation is (quoting the article)
> When you purchase a shipping label through them, they give you the output in either a PDF, PNG, or ZPL format. ZPL would be ideal, since it's just ASCII text which can easily be modified, or even stored in a database along side each order.
It seems like a much more reasonable intermediate format is SVG or JSX, both of which have mature to-PDF solutions, and both of which have much more well-known manipulation stories. Of course, that doesn’t lead to an absolutely bonkers blog title like this. But for anyone considering a similar setup, there are much more conservative options.
- you can target PDF
- you’re married to a JS stack
- your motivation is (quoting the article)
> When you purchase a shipping label through them, they give you the output in either a PDF, PNG, or ZPL format. ZPL would be ideal, since it's just ASCII text which can easily be modified, or even stored in a database along side each order.
It seems like a much more reasonable intermediate format is SVG or JSX, both of which have mature to-PDF solutions, and both of which have much more well-known manipulation stories. Of course, that doesn’t lead to an absolutely bonkers blog title like this. But for anyone considering a similar setup, there are much more conservative options.