Printing from Panther to XP over LAN, jobs dissapear...

[michaelsanford]

The LAN at my parent's house has an Windows XP machine to which is attached a Canon i960 and an Epson Color Stylus 740 printer via USB. I've enabled sharing and through "Windows Printing" have been able to add them both to my Panther iBook as Generic printers (since the model numbers don't appear in the Canon or Epson lists for me).

However, when I try to print a document to the Canon, Print Monitor says "Printing..." then "No Jobs" a reasonable amount of time later (10 seconds or so). The job never prints.

When printing to the Stylus it prints immedately, but what looks like a bunch of PS data (document starts with
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%RNumCopies: 1
etc...

Also the jobs aren't added to the window print queue, or at least they're not displayed.

So what'd I screw up?

EDIT: It was the drivers. I found some and at least now my Stylus prints properly, which is good enough.

 

[Ifrit]

The generic printer option often doesn't work. MacOSX tries to access your printer with an generic ps protocol which the printer often isn't capable to interpret correctly. (My printer wasted 30 sheets of paper while trying to interpret the OSX ps gibberish and I was out of the room. )
Sorry to say that, but you still need to input the type of your printer in the print center options.

Maybe you should get "gimp print" which installs additional printer driver you can use for smb printing (to a windows machine). Maybe your printer is listed there.

Furthermore, in my case the printer isn't listened by it's name, but by it's series name.
For examble, my printer isn't listened as HP 5550, but it belongs to the HP printerseries 900. Took me a while to figure that out. If you download and install gimp print you'll find a huge readme file which list, which printer belongs to which series.

 

[gsahli]

Just a side note - Gimp-Print is installed BY Default with Panther.
The Canon isn't fully supported for ANY network printing - some people report partial success using the Canon S450 and higher Gimp-Print drivers.

 

[michaelsanford]

Thanks guys.