alt Hacker News> Manual contains only 2.5 percent of its own G-code in its first version. That low figure is part of the point. Current FFF 3D printing resolution and text scale place limits on how much code can fit onto the object while also describing the volume of the object itself. A fully self-contained version would enter an endless loop, since every printed mark would add more data to be described.
The fact that quines exist means that it must be possible to print a fully self-describing book of this sort, though it's possible that you'd require a more expressive language.
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It's fascinating how revered people are who talk in metaphor and implication like this about relatively simple things, when far more complicated things are happening all the time inside their devices.
G-code by itself only describes the series of motor movements over time, though I think it would be practically feasible to have a book contain an executable script, which would generate the same g-code as the one used to print the book. It would be really interesting to see how large the resulting book is.
"This prompt, when fed to a sufficiently capable LLM, will generate the G-code to produce a 3D printed model of a book containing this quote, verbatim, in raised letters."
Compression could be interesting
There's probably a way to make an xz file that decompresses to g-code for itself. But plain g-code is not powerful enough because it's just a list of movements due the tool head to perform - no computation.