3 ms·
It would be a funny hack to try to trick a printer with malformed content to over-print that section of paper a multitude of times.
by cheschire 5y ago
It would be a funny hack to try to trick a printer with malformed content to over-print that section of paper a multitude of times.
- kragen 5y agoThis is absolutely something you can do with ASCII dot-matrix printers, and it's not even malformed! It was common to end a line with a CR rather than a CRLF in order to overstrike some characters three times for bold, or overstrike them with _ for underlining; somewhat less common was to overstrike several different characters to get a solid block (such as 0, #, and *). (Accented characters were likewise achieved by overstriking `, ', and ~, but usually using backspace rather than CR.) With a normal amount of ink on the ribbon, you would punch through the paper after less than ten overstrikes. I understand that line printers (those that printed a line at a time rather than a character at a time) also supported overstrike sequences, but I never punched through the paper on one. Likewise, presumably the same approach would work with a daisy-wheel or typeball printer, but I can't testify.