Welcome Home

One of the very first “big” programs I wrote all by myself was a banner-printing program for my TRS-80. It was all in TRS-80 Basic and I wasted almost an entire carton of tractor-feed paper while I was writing it. It was terrible code, and I’m sure if I saw it today I would cringe, but when it finally worked and I could print these huge banners and hang them around the house it was all worth it.

So today I got a new printer, and since my wife is coming back from being on-site with her client tomorrow, I decided to re-visit my banner-printing past. I’ve written a banner printer using HTML and CSS that will print out single a single character on each page, which I can then hang up to make a “Welcome Home!” sign. The code itself is relatively simple, with the only tricky bit being the support for combining marks I had to add to allow me to print Thai correctly. Enjoy!