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The Print Shop Club – Create Apple II Print Shop printouts on-line (theprintshop.club)
74 points by empressplay on Dec 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments


I remember how Print Shop-made banners were all over my elementary school in the 80s. The fonts became instantly recognizable to me. It was easier to make banners then than now, because continuous-feed printers were more prevalent.


Taping together letter-sized sheets of paper just isn't the same thing as a continuous banner coming right out of your school's AV cart Apple II printer, ready for coloring. :)

The other thing thing the fanfold paper was good for was laying out a code listing on the floor, ready for marking up with pen and occasionally a straightedge.


TIL Broderbund still exists¹ and The Print Shop² is still a thing!

¹ https://www.broderbund.com/ ² https://www.broderbund.com/the-print-shop-23-1-deluxe


Note that, like Atari, it's not the same thing anymore. Quite the history article on wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broderbund


that's crazy. I don't think I actually used the Apple version, but I definitely remember the MS-DOS version of Print Shop Deluxe


Wow.


Related:

The Print Shop Club: Create Apple II Print Shop Printouts in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27856006 - July 2021 (44 comments)


I had the DOS version. It was our 80s version of 3d printing, on dot matrix. I had built everything in the app by the end of it and my parents bought a lot of refills of their sticky paper from Egghead.


I am impressed how their emulator MicroM8 emulates an Epson MX-80 printer to write a PDF: https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/help/peripherals/


Bring back the Apple II Broderbund program "The Toy Shop" for online prints. That was amazing. https://mikeandlace.wordpress.com/category/paper-automata/


Using Print Shop in an emulator helped me write a driver of sorts for an old dot matrix someone gave me which I went into detail about in this talk https://youtube.com/watch?v=45aeGWPRL0g


Virtual II lets you plug in a real printer into a virtual Apple IIe. It's much, much quicker than this web-based emulator. Unfortunately, when I print it's mostly fine, but skips one single line. I don't think it's flow control issues, though, since it almost entirely works.

Instead I print to PDF, and then use an older Ghostscript to drive the printer. It requires some scaling, though.

Holiday cards this year are sorted, at least!

https://twitter.com/joshu/status/1601454795885199366


thanks for the tip




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