Wouldn't it be nice if we have some way of printing directly to a device?

I'm seeing lot's of old android tablets, and maybe... we can use it as instant paper displays or something.

Basically, have a little device that appears to the computer like a printer or something. And then you can print to it, and have it display to the old tablet (wirelessly).

If after viewing on the tablet, you need to print it out, for hardcopy annotations etc... then you can press the print current document on the tablet, and it will print on an actual printer.

Even better if you can annotate the paper virutally on the tablet as well.
-- mofosyne, Oct 04 2014

BlackBerry Print To Go http://us.blackberr...ps/print-to-go.html
Yeah, so there's this. [the porpoise, Oct 06 2014]

Print to PDF (built in to modern browsers and OSes) is basically this.
-- Spacecoyote, Oct 04 2014


Aye, I like that.

But I would like to print to a remote tablet/computer as a PDF.

That's possible too?
-- mofosyne, Oct 04 2014


should be easy to use a tablet as a screen, through USB, no? or is that one of those bleedin'obvious things that designers accidentally overlooked.
-- FlyingToaster, Oct 04 2014


Well if you are using the tablet as 'psudo' paper, you sorta want to be able to store the printed files into the device as well.

So you do want a somewhat wireless solution.
-- mofosyne, Oct 04 2014


Save your PDF to Google Drive (or similar) and then open it in the app.
-- Spacecoyote, Oct 04 2014


At a very basic level, putting the spooler on the tablet (networked to the PC) would cover it. Then, of course, you need something to read and manipulate the spooler.

If you want to annotate in situ, "print to .pdf" seems the easiest method, albeit with much more bells'n'whistles than you need. The file would be written to a network shared-directory on the tablet.
-- FlyingToaster, Oct 04 2014


So, "print preview" on a separate device, incorporating a network spooler ?

Neither idea is particularly innovative...
-- 8th of 7, Oct 06 2014


Fully baked [link].
-- the porpoise, Oct 06 2014


Well hopefully we shall see it in more devices besides BlackBerry
-- mofosyne, Oct 06 2014



random, halfbakery