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1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 09:08:28 EST thurloat 📌

   It would be cool if there were an E-Ink device that appeared on the network (or via USB) as a printer, and you could print documents directly to it for the road or for signing.

   Then if you marked them up or made notes, you could "scan" them back to your computer via the same type of mechanism.

   1. Adam (inkslinger@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 11:50:03 EST Adam

      in reply to

      @thurloat That would be fantastic. My biggest complaint about my old school Kobo is that it's a pain in the ass to add books that aren't from the Kobo store. Of course, that's almost certainly by design (and, actually, it's not too bad on Linux; it was a bigger pain when I was still using Windows).

      1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 12:22:25 EST thurloat 📌

         in reply to

         @ink_slinger yea I've never found a "library management" application that wasn't garbage to use.

         maybe a fun #opensource project to hack on

         1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 12:23:25 EST thurloat 📌

            in reply to

            @ink_slinger e-ink + touchscreen + pen + SBC + some virtual network printer server, probably the most complex part of the prototype

            1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 12:26:39 EST thurloat 📌

               in reply to

               @ink_slinger could probably actually just use CUPS + a PDF print driver, the print everything to files.

               Scanning on the other hand might be more complex.

               1. Adam (inkslinger@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 12:29:21 EST Adam

                  in reply to

                  @thurloat The main disadvantage is that a lot of PDFs don't display nicely on e-readers, depending on the resolution of the source file and the not-always-standard device display size (e.g., PDFs display with really tiny text on my kobo and zooming in does just that...it zooms in rather than actually increasing text size/page count as an ePub document would).

                  That would still be the easiest option, I imagine. I don't think "print as ePub" is a thing (though maybe it could be?)

                  1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 07-Jan-2019 12:30:58 EST thurloat 📌

                     in reply to

                     @ink_slinger well, considering it would just be a Linux distro, I generally don't have issues viewing PDFs on my desktop using either the browser built-in one (perhaps as an electron front-end [yuck]) or whatever the native document preview application is for gnome/xfce