Printer sharing
Posted by marshall Sat, 22 Mar 2003 19:00:00 GMT
Victory! Today I finally managed to get printing set up from Windows to Mac OS X. This is another one of those things that I've been meaning to get to for a while.
We've had our inkjet printer hooked up to the iMac instead of the PC for some time now, since the color-sensitive apps we use like iPhoto and Photoshop are on the iMac and the colors seem to come out better when printed directly from the application (perhaps due to the system-wide color synchronization and such). So when a web page or something needed to be printed from the PC, we'd "print" it to a PostScript file, copy it over to the iMac, use the free GhostScript package to convert it to a PDF file, and then print the PDF file. Obviously that's kind of a pain to do for every printout, so I've been wanting to set up printer sharing over our network so that the PC could just print directly.
Unfortunately, while Mac-to-Mac printing is insanely easy, and Mac-to-Windows file sharing is pretty straightforward, Mac-to-Windows printer sharing is not quite so simple. All the software is there on the Mac OS X side (as of version 10.2), but it takes some rather obscure steps of editing the CUPS and Samba configuration files to make it work. Thankfully there's a helpful tutorial at Mac OS X Hints that goes through most of the steps. It didn't cover all of the steps for connecting our Epson printer, though, so if you're going to attempt this at some point, e-mail me and I can let you know what else I did to get it running.
