Legit Reviews

I work in an office at my university. My personal machine is a Dell laptop running Windows Vista Business Service Pack 1 (32-bit). The office machine is a PowerMac G4 with Mac OS X "Tiger" (10.4.11). The printer attached to the Mac computer is an HP DeskJet 840C using USB.

I am trying to print from the Vista machine to the Mac. Currently, I have only a kludge of a solution, where I am using the Microsoft Publisher Color Printer driver on my PC so that I can talk to the printer attached to the Mac. This is fine, except I cannot control the quality on the printer so it uses Normal/Best (can't tell which), burning through a lot of ink and taking forever to print. Also, I cannot specify the number of copies I want. I can tell it "5" but it only ever prints one!

I have installed Bonjour for Windows 1.0.5 and tried using the Printer Wizard. I cannot see the printer that is attached to the Mac. I can see the Mac over the network and even connect to the printer, but again I have to use a generic driver to do so. Windows File Sharing and Print Sharing are enabled on the Mac. I have tried reinstalling Bonjour on the Windows machine, no luck.

Why can't I see the printer attached to the Mac from the Bonjour Printer Wizard so I can use a better driver?

I found the answer to my own question after Googling around for weeks.

http://blog.codefront.net/2007/02/05/sh ... o-windows/

I quote (in case the source ever disappears):

"First point of reference: Print from Windows XP to a shared Mac printer tip on Mac OS X Hints. The tip suggests you select a PostScript driver in Windows after finding it on the network (which requires you to do several things first, but we will come to that later). This worked, but it was sub-optimal because you couldn’t use the printer driver software to do stuff like 2-up printing (i.e. print 2 pages per side per sheet) [or in my case control output quality - Sovereign]. This post will show you how to share a USB printer from Mac OS X to Windows PCs with full driver capability.

1. On the Mac (the one that the USB printer that you want to share is connected to), go to the Sharing preferences pane and ensure Printer Sharing and Windows Sharing are both turned on.
2. Fire up your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:631 - this is the web interface to CUPS. When asked to enter a password, login with your Mac OS X user account (it has to be an administrator account).
3. Go to the Printers tab and add a new printer (yes, in addition to any existing printer configuration that already exist for the same printer). Choose a name that’s short and descriptive (no spaces). For the purposes of this guide, let’s call it ‘uberprinter’. Best to keep it under 12 characters since Windows is finicky.
4. When asked to select a device, select USB printer.
5. You’ll be asked for a Device URI. To find out, open up a terminal and type lpinfo -v. You should see your USB printer coming up. Mine came up as ‘direct usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’. Copy and paste this (without the ‘direct’ part - i.e., I’d have copied ‘usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’) into the ‘Device URI’ field.
6. Select a ‘Make’ of ‘Raw‘. Keep going until the printer is added.
7. You’re done configuring from the Mac. But before you go, determine your Mac’s IP address (do a ‘ifconfig’ in a shell or fire up System Profiler and check out the ‘Network’ item) - note it down somewhere. Now it’s time to hook up your Windows machine to use the shared printer.
8. OK now go to your Windows machine and add a new printer (Control Panel -> Printers and Faxes). Select ‘A network printer… blah blah’. Don’t browse for the printer, you will enter its IP address directly in the ‘URL’ field. Enter ‘http://your.macs.ip.address:631/printers/uberprinter’ (replacing ‘your.macs.ip.address’ with your Mac’s IP address and ‘uberprinter’ with the short name you gave your printer). If you can’t remember your printer’s name, just scurry back to the Mac and browse to http://127.0.0.1:631/printers/. You should be able to see the printer you added listed there - its name is linked there.
9. Now, all that’s left is to install the correct Windows printer driver on the Windows machine. If you’re lucky Windows already has your driver, if not do whatever you need to get the proper driver - after all, the purpose of jumping through all these hoops is to get full printer driver functionality off the shared Mac printer.

That’s it. That’ll teach you for not getting a print server or one of those new printers with network functionality."

Glad you were able to find a fix for this, hopefully now that it's been posted on LR the googlebot will throw it near the top of search results for similar problems.

Dan

Wouldn't installing the LPR components on the Vista box help with this?

DaddyRabbit wrote:Wouldn't installing the LPR components on the Vista box help with this?

You mean the LPR port monitor? I tried that, no go.

My school has had horrible issues with printing in Macs. Ever since we got the new macbooks, the printers take a whole 10 minutes to process one person's document.

I tried the solution offered by Sovereign on September 24, 2008 but it would not accept the passwords of either of the two administrators' accounts that I have set up on that machine (an eMac running Tiger).

Does anyone know how to get around this?

Well the accounts have to be Administrator accounts on the Mac, I think...