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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer Network
My roommates and I share 1 printer. It was connected to my Mac and shared with their Windows XP boxes for months. We decided tonight to move the printer to the Windows XP router/firewall machine which is always on and never sleeps. But it didn't work ... after several hours of scratching my head, cursing, and perusing this site I managed to make it work with GIMP Print and the Windows XP TCP/IP Printing service hints. The results were very poor quality and taking forever to print. This was not good enough for us at all.

I finally stumbled upon step by step instructions for printing from an OS X machine to a not-PostScript printer on a Windows XP machine: How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X.

I tried this with our Canon BJC-8200. It worked flawlessly, and only took 15 minutes to set up. Now my roommates and I can print from any machine in the house whenever we want, without having to run to the other end of the house, boot or wake the Mac, run back to hit Print on the document, then running back to the Mac to get the output from the printer.
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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer | 9 comments | Create New Account
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Sleep
Authored by: dabeatles on Jul 17, '03 01:22:10PM

Wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just set the Mac to never go to sleep?



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Sleep
Authored by: rlaan on Jul 18, '03 09:13:51AM

Wait for Panther, printsharing using SMB is standard, simply use Ghostscript on the Mac to print to a Windows shared printer that shows up right in the Printcentre, awesome....

---
The box said, Windows 95 or better, so I bought OS X.



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: veshman on Jul 18, '03 12:50:17PM

I take my iBook everywhere and work in lots of windows only environments via wifi. i found this method to be able to use a windows printer via smb very helpful, and it seems a lot less involved than the procedure you described. there is no new software to install. in fact, it uses CUPS which is part of osx anyway:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/cups_printing_in_jaguar.html

You still have to set up your printer to be shared on the windows end, but it is not as involved as what you had to do.

Best regards,
Bhavesh



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: Drewbie on Jul 20, '03 02:20:48AM

That was exactly the method I tried first, but all I got was a very poor quality (after tweaking the settings) print which took forever to process. I used the GIMP-PRINT BJC 8200 driver for GIMP-PRINT 4.2.5 Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Any ideas?



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: veshman on Jul 20, '03 11:08:17AM

I don't know..I haven't had any difficulties. I have primarily been printing to HP printers and just use whatever driver there was in the drop down list.

Maybe there is a better driver than the GIMP one? I don't really know.

Bhavesh



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: irni on Jul 18, '03 03:03:49PM

I just used ghostscript to make a pdf2pcl script on the mac and then used atprint to print the resulting pcl. Then I had a friend make a gui wrapper where I just drag the pdf on top of the icon and it does it all for me, printing it out and everything. Of course when I go to print I have the "hassle" of saying save to pdf file and then dragging the file onto the icon but it isn't that bad.



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: oogabooga on Nov 27, '03 11:36:21PM

I have an old HP Deskjet 820Cxi hooked up to a machine running XP. Even though I had it up and shared on the network, NOTHING seemed to be working to print - not Windows printing, not IP printing, nothing. The pages would leave my Mac and just 'disappear'. (It doesn't help that Gimp-print doesn't have a driver for this printer, either.) I ran through this solution in a few minutes tonight, and it worked like a charm.



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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: rsylvester on Nov 14, '04 10:47:20PM
I have been searching for about a month for a successful way to print from my Powerbook G4 to a networked Windows XP machine, and tried soooo many solutions with no success.

The best I got was printing page after page of garbled nonsense, or printing blank pages till the paper ran out in my printer.

This Ghostscript solution is the first one that works!!! Not only was I able to print to an HP LaserJet on an LPT port on an XP machine, I was also able to print to a Xerox WorkCentre on another networked XP machine. The kicker is that the WorkCentre doesn't even have Mac drivers! I'm able to print to a printer I shouldn't even be able to print to!

This is a valuable solution, and though it requires a few steps, it can be done quickly enough - and it means surefire success!

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Print to a shared non-PostScript Windows XP printer
Authored by: liam1101 on Jan 30, '06 04:05:25AM

I followed the instructions found at "How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X" (http://iharder.sourceforge.net/macosx/winmacprinter/) and it worked like a charm ... that is, until I ran a Windows XP update. Now print jobs from my Macs go to the virtual printer on the Window box and just sit there. I tried uninstalling / reinstalling RedMon and Ghostscript, but that had no affect. Does anyone have any idea what I might do to fix this?

Set up:

print "server" as well as a client:
Windows XP Pro with Samsung ML-1430 laser (non-PostScript) on parallel port

print client:
Mac OS X 10.4.4



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