The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

A caller had a question about how to “see” his printer, and print to it, from his Mac, given it’s connected to his Windows machine by USB.

I thought that we had answered this question before, however, I see that while we did answer a Mac-Windows printing question earlier this month, we did not answer this specific question! [see this May 3 MacWork.com article about cross-platform printing ]

The straight-forward answer is probably:

1. *Switch your USB printer to your Mac*,
2. Enable “Printer Sharing” in the Mac’s Sharing system preference
3. Download and install the Apple Bonjour software for Windows to your Windows machine, per the May 3rd article referenced above (here’s Apple’s Bonjour page )
4. You should then be able to browse your Mac’s printer from your Windows machine.

Here’s a Windows and Mac setup if you want to forge ahead, and leave your USB printer connected to your Windows system, and have OS X 10.4.5 or later: Scott Hurring’s How To Print from OS X 10.4 to Windows XP .

Otherwise, for OS X systems prior to 10.4.5, there’s this relatively complex way of managing it, please read the initial notes, to, as it’s not usually necessary to go through all the steps recommended here (experts only, please): How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 1:35 am and is filed under Advanced, How To, Mid-level, OS X, Printing, WGN Radio Show Notes, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.