faux striped source print-outs

You know the old green striped (fan-fold) paper that you printed out source code on?  I'm looking for a utility that lets me print out source code in the same way but with normal A4/letter sized paper on a laser printer.  Maybe with light/dark grey stripes. 

I remember I used to have a html editor that gave me this print option but I can't remember the name. 

Anyone got any pointers? 

Ian Cheung
Sunday, August 29, 2004

Maybe someone has a box of the stuff laying around. Or, a warehouse of it...

Bored Bystander
Sunday, August 29, 2004

You could probably paste the code into MS Word and then write a small macro to change every other line to have a light green background.

Matthew Lock
Sunday, August 29, 2004

Staples, for one at least, still sells the paper.  Lexmark, for one at least, still sells 132 column dot matrix printers that will spit the magic paper out.  I have one.  Too bad these things don't make all the right noises like those band printers would, as they spooled up when the next print job hit the queue.

Shit, damn, those were the days.

Mitch & Murray (from Downtown)
Sunday, August 29, 2004

Yes real printers let you know when they were working. Not like these new fangled whisper quiet inkjets and "laser" printers.

Matthew Lock
Sunday, August 29, 2004

At a computer store I worked at in college, we had some big assed dot matrix printer like a Qume, with a large printhead with considerable mass to it.

It was connected to some micro in the store like a Processor Technology SOL (Z80 desktop system from the late 70s.) I got on it and wrote a little BASIC program that looped on the following: send the printer a series of tabs, followed by delay and then a carriage return, followed by a delay...

The resulting motion of the printer on the flimsy particleboard table it was sitting on resembled the Tacoma-Narrows bridge collapse. I was able to tune up the rythm so it exactly matched the "natural frequency" of the table...

I hit Ctrl-C before anything was torn apart by the inertia, jubilant in the knowledge that I could trash something big and expensive with only software. :-)

Bored Bystander
Monday, August 30, 2004

Guys...  ever been in the vicinity of a 'Line printer' ?!! Seen one at an 'EDP dept' (remember?!! :-) )  of  a cotton mill. Those guys must have eardrums made of rubber.

Zero / One
Monday, August 30, 2004

The term to search for is "green bar paper".  There's discussion in one forum about how one would go about printing on simulated green bar paper in access, but I not sure how helpful the answers are to you. (http://tinyurl.com/58rvt).

a: it depends from what application you want to print from.
b: you'll probably end up having to write some sort of macro or postscript program that messes with format.
c: consider the option of physically printing on green bar paper.

  -tim

a2800276
Monday, August 30, 2004

Music ruled paper.

When input was cards and output was paper you could sacrifice a small tree to a core dump.

Simon Lucy
Monday, August 30, 2004

I remember a line printer that was FAST!  Also, since it handled multi-part paper, it was attached to a machine that could separate up to 6 copies of it's output.  That was remarkable -- they used 3 part paper and had reports sent to the top 3 guys at the company, which were only actually printed once.

GML
Monday, August 30, 2004

Forget green bar, go for the blue bar.  Those printers sounded like a chainsaw and performed essentially the same task!

devinmoore.com
Monday, August 30, 2004

Seems not that many people miss the "green bar" print-outs.  I find it helps a lot to read through code, it is even better than colour syntax higlighting which helps a bit but means I have to use the expensive and dog slow ink-jet. 

thanks tim, you probably have the most helpful input here.  I am really looking for a small utility, maybe shareware, that I can feed some perl, php, css and even conf files into and it then spits out the "grey bar" printouts. 

Actually I wonder if it is possible to do it in perl and maybe output it as pdf files and print those? 

Ian Cheung
Monday, August 30, 2004

Saving your source as HTM, with a background image for the stripes, will do the trick.

Raj Chaudhuri
Tuesday, August 31, 2004

I did this once, using the output of a cold fusion database query to html table, every other line I changed the background color, then ran html2pdf to create the report.

Might be nasty but it works ( still in production)

moseswhitecotton
Tuesday, August 31, 2004

hey, great ideas guys.  yeah I was thinking that the simple idea of a striped background wouldn't work because of lines running over etc. 

but the html table solution could work, maybe I could do it in php/css.  feed in a text file, have it formatted by the script and output as a html page.  Then let the browser handle the printing etc. 

any problems with this solution I'm missing?  and anyone interested in the utility if I do manage to cook something up? 

Ian Cheung
Wednesday, September 1, 2004

actually I just found a problem.  to get html more things exactly as they are like more than one space, I have to use <pre></pre> tags but that means if I have a long line it doesn't wrap and gets cut off in print outs. 

:o |

Ian Cheung
Wednesday, September 1, 2004

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