Although Apple's Airport Extreme can share a printer it was not quite so easy to use from my Vista Business computer. The instructions from Apple had me able to print only half a page to my USB HP Deskjet. Then the print job would error out. To make matters worse I could not delete the print job either.

So, here's what worked for me and hopefully for anyone else with this problem.

1. In your Printer Properties > Ports tab, disable "Enable bidirectional support". This allowed me to delete the print jobs.
2. In your Printer Properties > Advanced tab, disable "Enable advanced printing features". This allowed me to print whole pages.
   

I don't know if it will work for every printer but I can now print from my Vista computer.

Tags: printing, Airport

I have a HP laserjet 1100 being shared on my Windows XP SP2 machine and I wanted to use it from MacOSX 10.4.9 without doing anything fancy. This apparently is a little harder than it would seem. I finally found two solutions of which I preferred the first (HPIJS).

• Install Foomatic/HPIJS
• Install Gutenprint
  

Once you have installed one of the two print engines above, you can use the standard Add Printer dialog of MacOSX 10.4.x and browse for the Windows XP machine in the correct workgroup, select the shared printer and choose the correct driver for it (the HP 1100 driver was installed with one of the above two print engines.)

Personally, I found the Gutenprint drivers to have a little too much contrast and boxiness in them. These problems did not happen with the HPIJS drivers.  Gutenprint had many more customization options so maybe enough test prints could give me a better result.

In the standard print dialog, you might also need to manually set the Printer Features option to enable high resolution printing (and then save it as a preset to avoid setting it again.)

Tags: printing, Shared printer, XP

So, my father-in-law wanted to print the photos that we emailed him on his inkjet photo printer. I was stuck trying to explain to my father-in-law how to change the printer configuration so that he could print to 4x6 inch paper instead of a full page. It was just becoming complex using the Windows Photo Printing Wizard.
Finally it came to me that I could simply create a second printer configuration in Windows that by default would use the 4x6 paper size. Then I simply named it something like HP photo SMALL".

That worked great since he could pick the "SMALL" printer for the little photos and the other one was renamed "BIG" for anything else. Hope the simple solution helps someone else.

Tags: printing, Shortcut