Another contribiution in english, just in case anybody else in this world is still interested in Typewriters ;)

Here is what I've done so far:
https://www.netzherpes.de/blog/index.php?entry=entry160905-103014

Last week I managed to get a script working on my RaspberryPi for printing out tweets on a POS Printer. I've done something like this some years ago, but long before Twitter changed the API's .

This time I copypasted a ruby script by kris.cool, running (after some rubygem install orgy) out of the box. And I did not use a regular Printer on the USB Port, no, I've chosen my old Olivetti Typewriter ET compact 60 (with Centronics Interface LCU60P).
Some minor changes had to be done regarding the CR+LF, but nothing really challenging. German Umlaute are not supported yet, and '@' and '#' are not on the daisywheel, so I need to find a way to replace theese chars, too.
BUT: It's typing!



So... If anybody out there wants to wake me up, post a tweet containing #samenandreas and my old Typewriter will start banging like there is no tomorrow!

Have fun,
stay childish

Yours
Webdoktor

UPDATE:
as written above, the typewriter lacks # and @ and the unicode chatracters üöäÜÖÄß are coded in ascii, not german ascii. I did a little translation to insert the right chars, or (at) instead of @

Now it's complete
weiterlesen ...

Fertich

Ich habe sooo viele Bilder von Regalwänden gefüllt mit Spielekonsolen gesehen, dass ich auch angefangen habe solch eines aufzubauen..


Ha....
Das ist der Grundaufbau, die Zierde kommt noch

Sonntag Morgen, 7 Uhr, alles schläft, ich rette alte C64 Tapes



Danke Eni und Silvan für den Dachbodenfund. vlt finde ich eine Perle ;)

Last year or so I got the chance to reanimate an old Olivetti Typewriter ET compact 60 with a parallel printer interface. The most difficult part was to get it printing german Umlaute (öäü). I wrote a small script with linux "sed" command replacing the ö character with others that would fit on my Typewriter to print an ö
(example: sending an '|' results in a printed 'ö')
the linux command goes like

sed 's/ö/|/g'

I never found any instuctions on how to use this typewriter correct or which set of characters are replaced by others, and even the internet is unaware.

After changing the printer driver lately the character replacementscript did not work anymore as expected, so I had to re-Do it and dig a bit deeper to find out what is going on:
the characters for äöü have decimal values of 123, 124 and 125...
So I decided to find the corresponding codepage used.
Its: ISO/IEC 646-DE, a 7 bit coded character set used from the 60s to the end 80s (and btw. true german ASCII).
The detailed name is ISO 646-021 National Standard DIN 66003 (Code page 1011, 20106)

Is anybody out there who knows how to get windows printing to 7bit ISO 646-DE printers?

My solution is to simply to replace the characters (as shown here) and print the replaced text.

You can save the folowing script under cygwin and run it like "./replace.sh input.txt output.txt"

sed 's/|/</g;s/ü/}/g;s/ö/|/g;s/ä/{/g;s/Ä/[/g;s/Ö/\\/g;s/Ü/]/g;s/ß/~/g;s/«/"/g;s/»/"/g;s/$/\r/'  $1 >$2

Why does this work, even though the txt file is saved in utf-8?
The first 128 of the 2,164,864 characters in utf-8 are plain ASCII (sadly not the german version 😄 ).