Printing to a windows HP printer, get garbage

ansfrid

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I am trying to hook my new mac up to print from the printer attached to my wife's machine. I can find it, I can pick it, and it shows up as my default printer. When I print to it, it sure enough fires up a print queue, which prints a couple lines of garbage text (I was trying to print the word "test" from Textedit), and then it proceeds to grab and spit out all the paper in the tray. It doesn't print to the rest of them, but it also never ends until I just take away the paper at which point the printer complains at me. More oddly, my print job never shows in the print queue window, so I can't cancel it either. My only option is powering down the printer to clear everything out.

HP doesn't offer drivers for Mac on their site, so I am hoping they can be had elsewhere. It's a deskjet 656c, an older model, but it works.
 
ansfrid said:
then it proceeds to grab and spit out all the paper in the tray. It doesn't print to the rest of them, but it also never ends until I just take away the paper at which point the printer complains at me.

That's a classic symptom of trying to print postscript to a printer which doesn't understand postscript.

You'll have to get a Mac compatible printer. There are plenty that will work for both Mac and PC.
 
well bugger. I guess I need to decide how badly I need to print from this machine, vs. taking the time to access it from the windows machine, and print there.
 
Simbalala is half right.
The Only non-postscript printers that are compatible with PCs and Macs (for sharing) are Brother - because Brother now provides CUPS drivers for OS X. None of the other manufacturers provide CUPS drivers, so you Only get what their driver was written for on OS X -- USB.

Install these open source CUPS drivers (two downloads):
http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/hpijs/

You can then print to your non-postscript printer shared from a PC.
Guide:
http://www.ifelix.co.uk/tech/3004.html

Good luck.
 
Thanks.....I just found my mistake. My printer was set up as a generic postscript printer. I forgot to tell my mac it was a HP deskjet 600 series printer, after I did that it understood the difference.

Thanks for the help.
 
gsahli said:
Simbalala is half right.
The Only non-postscript printers that are compatible with PCs and Macs (for sharing) are Brother - because Brother now provides CUPS drivers for OS X. None of the other manufacturers provide CUPS drivers, so you Only get what their driver was written for on OS X -- USB.

Install these open source CUPS drivers (two downloads):
http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/hpijs/
Gsahli, thanks for the tip! For what it's worth, the link I used for a driver for the Brother HL-1240 printer (attached to a Windows machine on my network) is this: http://www.linuxprinting.org/macosx/hl1250/

Super-easy installation, and works perfectly. Thanks again.
 
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