(no subject)

[ellarien]

I have finally printed out the Behemoth novel-so-far, all 100K words of it. (85k? that was me conflating my guesstimate of 85% completion with the 85k words total I wrote last year, I think.) Twenty pages at a time, 179 pages total. Plus wastage, where it skipped a page and all the other pages in the batch are out-of-phase. Cheap laser, inexpensive paper; not professional tools.

I've had fiddlier, slower printing experiences. Like printing out my PhD thesis on a 2-min-per-page dot matrix printer with a BBC micro that could only handle about half a chapter at a time, and there was one chapter where I had to load a different set of handcrafted symbol fonts between pages. Like printing a different novel-length thing in four-sheet signatures on a 2ppm bubble-jet without a sheet feeder, hand-feeding every sheet four times. That was ... a while ago, though.

And now the laser printer wants me to order it a new cartridge. Fortunately, I did that a long time ago, and the replacement is sitting on top of my filing cabinet at work.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I've printed out 300,000 words on a daisy-wheel, single sided, double spaced...

[ellarien]

I don't think I ever had to deal with a daisy-wheel.

But I'm now remembering sprocket-feeds, and tearing off the edges with the holes in, and how the A4 version of sprocket-feed paper would never come out quite even because the page wasn't a whole number of sprocket-holes long. (I got through a ream of the stuff in drafts of my thesis, though the final version was on loose paper.)

I still miss the wide green-and-white line-printer paper, though. There's nothing like it for doing rough algebra.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I've never printed out anything very large (apart from 1 novel), but the fiddliest printing I ever did was when we produce the booklets for the educational software that my husband wrote.

Things like subscripts and superscripts had to be done by using a printer driver that would stop the daisy-wheel printer at the right point (I had to put in some kind of control character into the text) and then manually wind the paper up or down one click, press Enter to make it go again to print the letter or number, and then another control character would stop the printing to allow me to wind the paper back to the correct point.

And if you messed up, you had to go through all the performance again from the beginning.

[ellarien]

Digital printing was a huge step forward -- even if it did leave us with a few years of stuff that's legible but really not OCR-able.

Superscripts-subscripts were one of the things I had to handcraft for my thesis -- designing them on an 8x8 grid.