Sharing a Printer between Mac and Windows with Bonjour

Posted May 15th, 2006
Related entries: Mac

While in theory, if I have enabled printer sharing on my Mac, the printer should be available to Windows machines on my local network. In practice however, I’ve never been able to get this to work. I can get Windows to think its submitting jobs, but they never make it into the queue. I’m not sure if the problem is on the Mac side or the Windows side, but I’m putting my money on Windows being at the heart of the problem.

In any case, I finally found an ideal solution with Apple’s Bonjour technology (formerly Rendevous). Bonjour lets you create an instant network of computers and devices just by getting them connected to each other. The computers and devices take over from there, automatically broadcasting and discovering what services each is offering for the use of others. This is the same magic that makes iTunes auto-discover other iTunes clients on the network. With Bonjour services installed on your Windows machine, you can magically discover your shared Apple printers on the network. It’s a brain dead setup/install process:

  1. From your Mac’s Sharing preferences pane, make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled.
  2. On your Windows machine, download and install Bonjour for Windows
  3. After installing, click on the “Printer Setup Wizard” shortcut installed by Bonjour on the Windows desktop
  4. Select your printer from the list of network devices found by Bonjour
  5. Select “Generic PostScript Printer” (the default) as the printer type

I’m not too clear on why you need to use generic postscript driver rather than the native driver, but you do. I tried using the native driver for my Canon i960 but it failed to print. I’ve seen several other folks reporting this as well. It’s even selected by the Wizard by default. In any case, it works well with full color support and so forth.

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