Using a printer to print text with Max
Hi Everyone,
Is is it possible to print the text in a comment object or a similar object using an external printer?
Ideally I'd like to automate writing the text and automate printing it to paper.
Thanks in advance!
Jack
Not sure about automating the printing, you could look to [shell] for a task like that. You can also do File--> Export Image to get a .png of your patch or the selected objects, which could help get you towards the printing process, but I'm not sure how to do the image export automatically.
Edit: I forgot about jit.desktop, which would get the screenshot file saved automatically, assuming you know the dimensions you want to capture. The you might be able to use the launchbrowser message to Max to open an application that could print, or use [shell] or [terminal] to do it.
thanks Seejay, I'll look into this now.
J
I'd do it in three steps using [shell] (if you're on OS X):
1) Create a temporary .txt file containing your text
2) Print it
3) Delete file
The three steps (not sequenced) are detailed in this patcher. For more info on printing, type 'man lp' into Terminal.
Thanks Medd. Much appreciated
A completely different approach, if you have an old serial printer, is to simply send data to a serial port (possibly via a USB-to-serial converter).
I knew someone who did this for an installation once… those old dot-matrix jobs made a lot of noise, and you could get rhythmic patterns out of them by controlling the serial-data stream.
hey medd.
the link does not work. could you please verify it? thanks