Zimeng Xiong's WeblogSunday, 15 February 2026
Thought it was network issues, spacing issues and font differences that were causing the blank white lines but it turns out the default was set to epocs transport and not cups-png???
drawing and crosshatching both have their advantages. but drawing is much more consistent across many more images.
definitely needed xhigh for this
giving up on crosshatching, too inconsistent and not detailed. i think i will do pencil drawing style now, downsizing to 600 dots resolution will cut computation time by a lot hopefully, right now averaging 5+ seconds per image
getting some banding issues, either A. i broke the printer or B. im still hitting thermal limits, judging by the banding at the bottom i fear it might be A....
also spent an INSANE amount of time trying to figure out why it would suddenly drop connection when printing images. originally thought it was that the processor wasnt powerful enough to handle pure bitmaps or that the images exceeded memory or something so i had to find the driver for this printer to get CUPS/PDF/PNG support instead of just RAW and then rasterizetopos working and even tried different cables and suspected it was an power issue... but no, it dropped connections midway because if you try to activate all of its heaters/lasers it would self shutdown.... wonderful
you can just build things...faster???
was struggling with applying crosshatch to images (for a random side project where my thermal printer would be overloaded when printing a lot of black areas, so i needed to lighten them up), and just had spark you know, give it a shot, did it in less than the time it took for me to upload an image to a website and see how the website did it. insane.