I remember when i was a kid i had an (ancient by that time) Star LC-20 printer and the manual came with control codes to print stuff. At the time i made a small

I remember when i was a kid i had an (ancient by that time) Star LC-20 printer and the manual came with control codes to print stuff. At the time i made a small spreadsheet program (i had just learned how to parse expressions from a book i had on Turbo Pascal and making a spreadsheet program sounded the most logical application for that) that my father ended up using for a couple of years or so in the 286 he had at his shop (i used an XT clone). Obviously i also wanted to make sure that it had a manual since all professional programs have a manual. Months before that, the owner of a local computer shop had given me some stacks of old continuous paper that was around A6 in size (although it was squareish, so not really A6) that he was about to throw away, so i decided to use that since it had a nice "booklet" feeling. To write the actual manual, i wrote a program in Turbo Pascal that allowed me to write the text in a quasi-WYSIWYG way: i was editing each page in a full screen view (the paper could hold around 40x20 or so characters with the normal font) and each character could be "styled" with bold, underline, italic and big flags (this used a double sized font, i had to take into account the letter size) which was displayed as different colors. The program was thedefinition of being purpose built: it only supported that particular printer (well, that particular printer line, i also got an LC-10 at some point and it worked there too) and only that particular paper size. One of the most interesting bits i remember was that the printer didn't really had a concept of paper sizes (it was a continuous paper printer only) and the paper size i used wasn't fitting exactly the (default font) line height, so after printing every page, i was sending commands to change the line heights and move the paper back and forward with different line heights to reposition the header at the same spot for each page. After printing the pages i had to cut the perforated sides and since i didn't had a big stapler to hold all of them together, i opened the holes where the staple would be with a needle and put and bent a staple with a screwdriver (or something like that, i do not remember exactly) and then putting some tape over the side. That process wasn't as fun as writing the software and printing it, which ensured i only made a single copy of the manual which i gave to my father. He eventually gave it back to me some years later when he upgraded the computer he used at his shop, but that was almost 20 years ago and since then we moved a few times and i moved a few times myself and it was either lost or hidden in some long forgotten corner of my attic here (where the few things i still have from my childhood/teen days are stored). I do not remember printing stuff being particularly hard though, but i might have been lucky and ended up with a very simple printer.