pc printing to HP Photosmart C3150 on mac

[oddree]

I have no problems printing from my mac (10.4.11) to my HP Photosmart C3150 directly connected via USB. I have shared it out on the network and was able to add it as a printer on my PC (XP Professional). I can even send print jobs to it from the PC that show up in the print queue on the mac side and say they've been completed. They just don't happen to print out on the printer. There are no error messages on either side. Am I missing something? It should be working, right?

[MisterMe]

The MacOS X Help menu tells you what you have to do:

Sharing your printer with Windows users
You can let Windows computers on your local network use any printer connected to your computer.

If the Windows users install Bonjour for Windows, you can share your printer with them using Bonjour. To share a printer, open the Print & Fax preferences, then click sharing. Select the option to share printers and select the printers you want to share. Use the Bonjour Printer Wizard on the Windows computer to set up to print to your printer.

Otherwise you can share your printer with Windows users by using SMB/CIFS, as described below.

To share your printer with Windows users by using SMB/CIFS:

1. In Print & Fax preferences, click Sharing.
2. Select the "Share these printers with other computers" checkbox, and then select the printers you wish to share.
3. Click Show All, click Sharing, and then click Services.
4. Select the Windows Sharing checkbox.

To print to your printer using SMB/CIFS, Windows users must configure an SMB/CIFS network printer and use the Postscript printer driver, even if the printer isn't a Postscript printer. Your Mac will translate the Postscript code into code the printer can understand. Have the Windows users see their Windows documentation for information on adding a network printer.

Windows users printing via SMB/CIFS do not see any location information you may have entered for your printer.

Documents waiting to print on printers you're sharing are stored on your hard disk. (That is, your computer hosts the queue for the printer.)

[oddree]

Thanks for directing me to the Help info, but those are the steps that I've already gone thru. Again, my problem is not in the obvious configuration but in the lack of results.

I have tried adding the printer using Windows "normal" Add Printer routine which results in a printer that the PC thinks it's printing to and the mac shows processed print jobs but nothing actually happens with the printer.

I have also tried adding the printer using Bonjour. This actually gives me a printer that isn't really usable. By this I mean that when I try to print from any application on the PC, this printer is listed, but when I select it, the print button becomes grayed out. I am also unable to bring up it's properties or printing preferences from within the Printer and Faxes folder on the PC.

One more time, what do I have wrong here?

[tomdkat]

Wow, it's a small world. I'm in a similar boat with a Photosmart C3180.

When I first installed Bonjour for XP on a Windows machine we have, I was able to print a test page but now, like you, I can't bring up the printer properties of the Bonjour shared printer and I can't print to the printer, etc.

Peace...

[gsahli]

So both of you used a postscript driver on Windows, but weren't successful? The postscript driver it is referring to isn't a photosmart driver - you have to choose one like generic postscript or Apple Color Laserwriter xx, for example.

[tomdkat]

The driver that was setup by Bonjour on Windows XP for my Photosmart C3180 was for some other HP printer (I forget the model). When this Bonjour configured driver was being used, I was able to access the printer properties and print a test page. When I changed the printer definition to use the HP Photosmart C3180 driver, I could no longer access properties and could no longer print.

I've uninstalled and re-installed Bonjour for XP and the HP Photosmart drivers with no success.

I tried sharing the printer connected to the Mac-mini using Windows networking and from Windows, I could actually print but garbage came out (looked like PCL codes or maybe PostScript commands).

Peace...

[MisterMe]

... When this Bonjour configured driver was being used, I was able to access the printer properties and print a test page. When I changed the printer definition to use the HP Photosmart C3180 driver, I could no longer access properties and could no longer print.

...

You had it working?
You changed it?
It didn't work anymore?
Change it back!

[gsahli]

tomdkat - I think you have missed my point. On the mac, all print queues (printers in the printer list) expect to receive postscript, because on Macs all applications that were developed using the normal Apple development software output postscript. You have to choose a postscript driver on a PC in order to send postscript to the Mac print queue (where it gets converted to whatever the printer uses).

Does that help?