Is your printer tracking you?

You could illustrate the idea by replacing the yellow ink with black ink

Save as SVG. Send to CNC machine with pen plotter attachment.

Supposedly there are possible dithering patterns that can be used for keeping track of black and white printers

Good thing I print only on yellow paper

Now you know why class work sheets have static dots. Its not only color printers

they do actually have a method for black and white printers too. they just add tiny bumps around the letters outline and it reads like a line barcode after flattening the lines.

Ooohhh that makes sense. I could see this stuff also being super useful with any police investigations if the criminal printed anything at all. Thats pretty neat.

A BIG NOTE: This practice has been discontinued in most newer printers

Even though it would be expensive and probably fuck the printer up from the dye remnants, it would be cool to see that printed on a piece of paper after “replacing”/diluting the yellow with black or a more visible color.

You could also print your page the same yellow are to encode 1 and 0 when you make everything 1

When I heard the question I thought it was an obvious no.

thats it im collecting old b&w laserjets

Now to find which one does have this

this guy made obsession btw

My printer was purchased from a thrift store, good luck tracking that.

explains why the yellow is always empty

Someone on the internet needs to start selling yellow cartridges with a cornstarch slurry inside them instead of ink.

there is also an open source file you can just layer ontop of your document, that adds random yellow dots, making the encoded information useless.

I remember this from an episode of csi 20 years ago

And they told me I was crazy for still cutting up magazines for my ransom notes!