My dad worked for Control Data in the 1980s and talks about hiding designs in period characters on his schematics. Talks about how the plotters would get to the period, hang out for a while and then continue.

As a plotter artist also, I'm super happy to see this article on HN.

Printers using CMYK isn't strictly true, right? Aren't you able to choose the ink colors when getting prints professionally made?

I love plotter art and have dabbled a bit myself. The really fun part is how pen-on-paper is not completely reliable or a perfect line. You get a little texture if the pen skips. You can use watercolor pens that bleed. You can get crazy with something like Copic markers on Yupo paper so the whole thing stays wet and smears for minutes. It's part of the art.

This bit from the article made me laugh ruefully though: "it's as simple as buying some black paper and a white gel pen." You can get some beautiful effects with white ink on black paper but it is notoriously difficult to get looking good. White ink is tricky stuff. But that's part of the fun!

I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm wondering if I should get one.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?

Classic plotter art as performance art video: https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_schachter_how_i_turned_frus...

After rewatching that, I did a one-shot remake in p5js: https://g.co/gemini/share/b983a93e3ae2

Is there actual plotter simulation software I could be using?