Happy Holidays everyone. I’ve got some really cool stuff to share. It’s been an enormously productive month.

E-paper doesn’t have to be slow.

Do you remember the last e-paper update I did about a month ago? You can check it here…

Kind of neat, right? Well, forget it. That’s old news. Zerowriter Ink has since been even further optimized, moving to a new 1bit-optimized font system, better drivers, and smarter code.

With these new under-the-hood changes, Zerowriter Ink now REALLY performs. When I said best-in-class e-paper, this is what I had in mind. I set out to make something that could outperform the Pomera DM30, my favourite e-paper device ever. And, Zerowriter Ink is there. It’s a testament to what can be done with e-paper.

Cursor-Based Edits

Zerowriter Ink will ship with four extra keys… arrow keys! Because you can now edit like a traditional word processor. You can either install the arrow keys, or you can use modifier+WASD to move the cursor around.

Yep. On the back of the enormous engine improvements, I decided to implement cursor-based editing. This feature is by far the most requested, I receive a few emails a month about it! (By the way, feel free to email me, or join the discord, if you want to chat.)

Basically, latency made it difficult to use before. But now, there’s no latency. Now it just… works. Of course, it’s optional, and you can work without using the arrow keys at all.

Navigate through your document, insert lines, delete text, insert words, bump text to new lines, etc. It’s all in there.

Custom Fonts & More Text Sizes

And, on the other side of those improvements, is better font handling. More fonts, more sizes, in less memory. 80-90% less memory, actually.

Thanks to a new font library, and @bitbank2’s outstanding work, Zerowriter Ink operated on a new compressed font system. While offering some truly amazing performance increases, it also enables users to convert and implement their own TTF fonts. I’m working now on converting over the original Zerowriter font from my raspberry pi project (Courier Prime), but we should be able to allow you to load up a custom font from your SD card when the Zerowriter Ink boots.

This also means the foundation is there to implement non-Latin languages: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.

Extended ASCII

Zerowriter Ink is moving from ASCII to extended ASCII. Extended ASCII is 256 characters, and represents the vast majority of Western/European languages.

Vielen dank, liebe Unterstützer!

Production Timelines

Zerowriter Ink is hitting production. Our first production run is about 600 units. The ordering process is underway, with materials and resources headed to Croatia, where Soldered will be getting everything together.

This time of year is difficult to forecast, and things were a bit slower than anticipated to get going. At this point, I expect we will be doing general fulfillment in April. This is a bit later than my earlier estimate, but I hope you understand and support the extra development time to ensure the Ink is ready for the world.

Happy holidays, and talk soon!