Show HN: Thermal Receipt Printers – Markdown and Web UI

I've not much to say on the thermal printer part of this but the extensions they did to markdown are great. They had me double taking for a few seconds thinking they might be real markdown because they make so much sense.

    [align=center]    Center-align the following text (also left, right)
    [qr=https://...]  Generate and print a QR code

I actually use my printers thank you very much. Even bought one of those bank teller slip printer things and a few boxes check-sized slips. I use them for time tracking and todo list.

I didn't go totally crazy, though, and stopped before getting too deep into "...and then OCR them using the check scanner" because I remembered I was already keeping track of start/stop times in a database when printing the slips.

This comes so timely. I bought the receipt printer last week and a large metal sheet to hold them magnetically to the wall for a real life todo kanban board

What’s a cheap but ok thermal printer? The brand mentioned in this repo?

I wanted to setup https://www.colonnes.com but their recommendations were quite expensive.

This rules! I've been working on a similar project where friends DM a discord bot and it prints out a "fax" on my thermal printer.

One thing I solved differently: I rendered the fax as an image using PIL and then I just print the image. That way I can support arbitrary Unicode and can lay things out independently of what my printer is capable of.

Example rendered fax: https://github.com/frizzle-chan/fax.frizzle.lol/blob/main/fa...

I had started working on something similar a few months back but as a collection of CLI utilities.

The first was a todo list printer where the todos are written in a YAML file. It includes fields for the name of the list and the date.

I also started working on a Sudoku printer (which I think is only possible on 80mm paper). But I completely forgot about the entire thing after coming back from vacation.

You've inspired be to get back to working on it :D

As an aside, are there any good recommendations for a wifi/bluetooth printer using 80mm paper that doesn't break the bank? I initially bought the Munbyn ITPP098P but it being USB only is a bit unergonomic.

Called me out with that first sentence

Obligatory "be careful with that poison paper" warning![1]

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

these things seem like too much fun, someone made a gleam printer library (https://hexdocs.pm/escpos/) and suddenly everyone on the discord is buying a printer...

I troubleshoot thermal printers for work and the error is rarely in the hardware. I have no issue with this work request; TPs are deterministic and predictable.

would be cool if it supported basic html/css

Can we not print full pdf type stuff with thermal printers?

I just bought one a couple weeks ago actually.

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