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Ask Slashdot: Best Options For a Standalone Offline Printing Station?
An anonymous reader writes My father is considering a Chromebook, but there is a problem: He occasionally wants to print. Chrome OS only talks to physical printers by Google Cloud Print, so the printer has to be online one way or another. But my father wants to surf over 3G, so he has no network infrastructure. Now what are the best options for a standalone printing station that works offline? I have a Raspberry Pi and a small touch display that I could spare, how about I prepared some scripts and called that the dedicated printing computer? Then what printers have ARM drivers available? Does anybody know a consumer-grade or small-office-grade printer that can print ordinary PDF docs directly from flash drives or memory cards? I have looked, but could not find one yet. The devices I found that print PDF docs directly only do so if the docs were made by the (proprietary) printer-related software or the printer itself. There are ways to turn PDF docs into series of JPG files. A lot of ordinary printers can print JPG files directly from flash media, should my father stick with this option? Also, what are secondary options in case the offline printing station does not work out? Should he consider buying a 3G-capable WiFi router (there are enough available) and set up a home network, then use Google Cloud Print? Should I just send my father to a copy shop? Or should he simply forget about the Chromebook and get an ordinary laptop with a common OS that can talk to printers by USB?
This insistence that everything is in the 'cloud' is getting really old, particularly with Android. There are occasions dear Google when someone is offline. I don't want to have to store my Earth KML files on Drive to view on mobile Earth app. I don't want to have to connect my android phone via USB to copy or move things around on my SD card. I don't want to have to print over the internet. Whatever networked fantasy land you live in at GoogleHQ, is not reality. If I wanted to be restricted to what I could do with my devices "for my own good", I'd go back to the iPhone. You are rapidly chipping away at my reasons for switching to Android.