Re: [NTLK] Partial Success going from Notes to PDF

Don,

First, thank you so so much for your work. I feel the ability to
extract handwritten notes and sketches off the newton is an absolutely
vital endeavor. Imagine, you buy for anywhere from $10-$100 on ebay a
messagepad/emate and with little trouble use it to jot down notes
combined with sketches that can be e-mailed, posted on the web, and
printed. This ability turns the newton from a sad, slowly decaying
piece of nostalgia-ware into a cost-effective device that provides a
real alternative to expensive tablet PCs. I've got to say (and it's
with the knowledge that I'm probably going to bring on flames here)
that I'm surprised that with all the loyal newton users out there,
this problem has yet to be solved. My emate is going to be no more
than a cool little typewriter unless this can be figured out.
Honestly, whatever other features the emate has are just second-rate
at best compared to what can be done now on a smartphone, like a
Centro, which costs less than $100.

Anyways, back to the immediate topic at hand...

> I don't have a Newton-compatible printer to do further testing, but
> it seems to me that perhaps the next step would be for a brave soul
> to try a similar experiment, but without using the LPR driver.

Don, just to be make sure I understand right, when you refer to
printing without LPR, you're referring to using a newton-compatible
printer, yes?

This brings me to something I don't quite understand - maybe someone
can weigh in on this, but were newtons ever able to print out ink text
notes, say via straight to newton compatible printers? Was there once
a time where you could get more than "Boo" written in ink-text off the
device?

I'm wondering, if it was possible to print ink text notes from a
newton style printer, then wouldn't it be possible to just capture the
data coming out of the newton serial port, dump that on your mac/PC,
and just use some software, purely on the computer, to convert the raw
data to postscript, PDF, etc.? This would be something that doesn't
require installing the LPR driver on the newton but rather uses the
internal newton printing software, unmodified. Is this idea feasible?

Ed

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Received on Tue Jul 29 16:34:36 2008