OP here, I'm curious about the mentioned swellpaper, though I confess, its been years since I had access to an inkjet printer(not much use for one when you can't make use of hardcopies and all of one's coursework is submitted digitally, and the need for one hasn't come up in the years since I finished my bachelor's degree), so that would be at least two pieces of hardware I'd need to purchase... how do you transfer images from the normal paper to the swell paper? Tangentially, I'm reminded of some stuff that was used for one project during one of my art classes in highschool... it was essentially kitchen sponge that came in roughly letter or A4 sized sheets, but which had been compressed to remove the air pockets. Moisture would cause it to swell up, and the damp spots would stay swelled once dried... drawing with dry media like pencil or crayon would result in no swelling, drawing with a felt tip pen or marker would leave raised lines, and paint would leave areas quite spongy... and of course, plain water could be used to swell things up further... wish I knew what the stuff was called, even though it would be kind of useless for any kind of automated process... and I have doubts the moisture content in printer ink varies enough to be noticeable if you successfully sent a sheet of the stuff through a inkjet printer. I do recall sifting through Amazon's customer questions on a few Kricut models a few years back... never purchased one, likely due to either not being able to find a clear answer on whether they are Linux supported, generic enough support isn't needed, or locked down to the point reverse engineering would be required to get it to work with Linux or confirming the model that would have fit my budget falls into that third category... Still, I'd be interested in hearing how things go when you get around to trying it out. And yeah, a laser cutter/engraver is definitely on my list of things I'd want in my dream workshop... though everything I've ever heard suggest they start expensive and that speed comes at a premium... though slow and steady might be a hard limitation there to avoid melting where you don't want it when working with plastic or metal and avoiding things catching fire when working with wood or other combustible media... or at least, I've read that an issue that comes up when laser cutting thicker sheets of acrylic are edges being less than crisp from where some of the plastic beyond the cut gets melted... And while tech Kickstarters that catch my attention always seem to have starting prices in the "I literally can't buy anything else during the paycycle the pledge is collected" or even "I'd have to go delinquent on all my bills to cover this" territory, I'd be all over a campaign that offers a streamlined method for producing tactile drawings of any kind... though, considering how many Kickstarters I've backed have included .stl files among their digital rewards and how often 3D printers, and knowing engrave/emboss algorithms(albeit, designed to generate grayscale images resembling what the source image would look like engraved/embossed rather than calculating actual depth data) have been a somewhat common feature inimage editing software since at least the WinXP if not Win9x days(I started using Linux as my primary OS not long before Vista came out), the thought of a "2.5d" printer that's essentially a 3-d printer optimized for printing bas reliefs that fill most of the buid plate and using algorithms to calculate depth from jpegs and pngs or directly taking the depth map from stereoscopic cameras to generate the bas reliefs to print... but yeah, it feels like tactile technology is lagging behind audio and visual technology by a disturbing extent. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list