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A comment on Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer. Parent comment

Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer by ssl-3 on Friday October 04, 2024 @01:43PM (#41743725)
An old HP laser printer will buffer plain text line-by-line, and will print a page once the last line is buffered.

That buffer could have several random programs' outputs in it, all just dumped as simply as possible to /dev/lp0 (or lpt1 or whatever), and it works.

A LaserWriter can't do these things.

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Re:Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer by tonyedgecombe on Friday October 04, 2024 @02:58PM (#41744497)
>will print a page once the last line is buffered.

You could usually set a timeout to eject the page if no data had been received for a while.

>A LaserWriter can't do these things.

The LaserWriter could emulate a Diablo printer which would do the same thing. It wouldn't accept PostScript then though.

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