We’re in Lyon to begin this year’s European adventure. The last time we were here, we flew BA through Heathrow, and, as usual, it took a very long time to get through intra-Heathrow security so we could (barely) connect to our flight to Lyon. This time, we flew UA through Frankfurt, and it took nearly two minutes to get through Passport Control, and there was no security check required – it’s as if they trusted the TSA!

I had planned on taking an Uber from LYS (Lyon Airport) to our hotel, the Hotel de Verdun 1882 Best Western, but there were no signs to steer us to the Uber pickup area, and the “typical” price for a taxi was about the same as an Uber, so we hopped into one of the many taxis that were waiting for passengers.

Traffic going into the city was very bad. Lyon was hosting Manchester United in the UEFA Europa Cup quarterfinals this evening, and our route took us past the stadium. And then we hit construction. And more traffic. And more construction.

Our driver’s husband kept calling her asking when she’d be home, and she kept telling him “as soon as I drop my passengers at the Hotel de Verdun” (I paraphrase freely, since I don’t know French but could pick up a few words). It took about 90 minutes, but we did eventually reach the hotel, which is well located with plenty of restaurants within an easy walk.

We were too tired to try to interpret a French menu, so we played it safe and went to Les 9 Lotus, a Vietnamese restaurant with a bilingual menu and an English-speaking owner; it was delicious, fairly inexpensive, and quick…all of which were exactly what we wanted after a long day of travel.

Tomorrow, we plan to visit some sites we missed on our previous trip, like the Musée Lumière, which was under construction then.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best monochrome printer is a Brother laser printer; they last forever, are stingy with toner, and aren’t annoying. I had one for years before getting rid of it in favor of an HP color laser – I should have kept the Brother for the 99% of the time I don’t need to print in color, but I didn’t have the desk space to keep both. Such is life.

Brother also makes very good label printers, like my faithful PT-2730, which I’ve had for more than a decade. It’s a little worse for wear, but it works like a champ, connects to my Mac so I can type labels on a real keyboard, and isn’t annoying.

Well, it wasn’t annoying until recently. Brother stopped updating their label-creation program for this printer on the Mac about 5 years ago. It worked fine for three years, then it got a little flaky…and it stopped working with the most recent update to Mac OS.

They have a new program for current systems – but for some reason, it doesn’t support a ten-year-old printer, and I saw no reason to replace the printer when I could just write a little program to print to the printer.

And it worked, but the output was ugly – diagonal lines and curves were very jagged.

I knew the printer could print nice labels…in fact, I could print nice labels to it from Microsoft Word, but it took a lot of work (make a PDF, crop it so only the actual text I wanted to print was left, and print – it took a couple of minutes per label).

I did a lot of research on how I could create anti-aliased text (not jaggy); eventually, I found the secret…draw the text in a bigger font and then reduce the size of the image. I’d actually tried that much earlier in my quest, but I’d only tried doubling the size of the font, and that left a lot of jaggies.

Multiplying the font size by 10 works great! The labels below were created using the factor after “Windows”, and it’s easy to see the differences between 1, 3, and 10x. Some glitches showed up at a factor of 100 – I don’t know why, and I have no intention of finding out. It also turns out that sending the printer driver the big image and letting it reduce it to fit produces better results than having my code reduce the image – again, I don’t know why and I’m not going to spend time investigating it.

The Brother editor was always a little fiddly; I won’t miss it. It’s much easier to just go to the command line and type makelabel "Kitchen Lights" – that’s my story, anyway!