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Comment by IdiotSavage

6 hours ago

> any program that supports printing

Unfortunately printing support seems to go out of fashion, at least in macOS land.

Lately I needed a quick printout of a markdown document. I could have used TextEdit for the raw text, but I wanted the styling too. Learned that neither VSCode, Xcode nor Obsidian can print. (There is a community plugin for Obsidian.)

LOL. TIL you can’t print from VSCode.

  • printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

    Used to be that printing a text file was just `cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0` .

    It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

    • I think back in the days before office workers that happened to do their work on a computer had access to the ancient relatives of "Microsoft Word"/"Libreoffice Writer", it was pretty normal for printers to take care of plain text files, with about as much fidelity as manual operation of a classic purely mechanical Typewriter.

      Since then printers progressively forgot how to cope with such "documents", though IIRC good-old HP "PCL" should only require about a bare minimum of framing/job control to get a modern printer to handle ASCII plain text.