[etfb]

Are you old enough to remember daisy wheel printers? Basically, the computerised equivalent of a typewriter, with the individual letters on a daisy-like wheel that spun around under computer control to produce slow but "letter quality" printing. When I showed people my handwriting font, they were very impressed and asked if my printouts would be in my handwriting too. Given that the only printers we had were daisy wheels, I suggested that perhaps this would not be happening.

[Someone]

Some daisywheel printers could be coerced to print high-resolution graphics, by repeatable printing a few zillion periods and using the variable line spacing and tab settings.

'Fast' was not a word one would use to describe them, though, even compared to the matrix printers that took minutes for each page of high-resolution output.

[etfb]

Coming back to the original post, I wrote a proof-of-concept Braille output program for a daisy wheel printer. Basic idea was: take a line of text input, eg "hello". Convert to Braille ("⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕"), but reverse the dot patterns to make "⠪⠸⠸⠊⠚"). Sandwich a sheet of paper towel between two sheets of paper, feed it into the printer and print the reversed dots using "." and space, micro-positioned.

Theoretical result: raised dots punched into the paper by the daisy wheel, able to be read by a blind person.

Actual result: the proportions were wrong for reading, and most of the time the paper jammed on the roller because of the padding.

Nice idea though.