I woke up today realizing that I had two problems that I could solve if I just spent a little time learning how to make images in Python:

• Creating a graphic for the daily Pushover weather notification that I send to Diane and me; right now, it’s just plain text and it’s difficult to pick out the important information. Pushover doesn’t support HTML or formatted text, but it does allow adding an image to the notification.
• Printing labels on the Brother PT-2730 on Big Sur, as I mentioned yesterday.

The second problem was smaller, so I attacked it first. It was easy to create a PNG file from the text for a label and print it; the hard part was figuring out how to print it to a label of the proper length, and the documentation is, shall we say, very limited. Trial-and-error was my friend.

A few dozen trials, and most of my tape supply, later, I have a working program that lets me print labels in any font on my machine (figuring out how to specify the font by name and variation instead of filename and index was not easy). It’s on GitHub in case it’s of use to anyone else.

Creating the graphic for the weather notification will happen some other time.

Shabbat Shalom!

I hit my first significant incompatibility with Big Sur and my new Mac mini today. For many years, I’ve had a Brother PT-2730 label maker attached to a Mac in the office; by using Brother’s P-Touch Editor, I could create labels in any font I wanted. The software wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to use, but since I was only writing a few words at a time, it sufficed.

But when I migrated to Big Sur, the software crashed as soon as I tried to type anything. And Brother doesn’t seem to plan to support it on Big Sur; they have a new version of the editor on the Mac App Store, but it explicitly does not allow printing to older label makers like mine (I tried).

The obvious solution (at least from Brother’s viewpoint) would have me buy a new label maker that is supported – but that seems silly.

The next most obvious solution would be to install the Windows version of the editor on Diane’s Windows laptop, plug the printer into that machine, and declare victory. But that would require fiddling with Windows.

I was able to print directly to the label printer from Microsoft Word, but I haven’t found a way to print a label with an arbitrary length from Word. I’m looking for code that will do it from the command line, but haven’t found it yet.

Maybe using Windows for printing labels isn’t a totally horrible idea after all.