If you have a printer set up on your Mac, then sharing it has always been a relatively simple process. Doing so allows anyone on the local network or who have remote access to the current system via iCloud’s Back To My Mac service, to see your printer as a nearby printer in the standard print dialogue. By default, this setup allows anyone to print to the shared printer; however, you can also set restrictions to require authentication before printing is allowed. Continue reading
Tag Archives: printer
How to print in Black and White in OS X
If you need to print in black and white or in grayscale from your Mac, you might be hard-pressed to find an option to do so in the standard print window. OS X supports a number of different printers; however, besides general “quality” sliders, many of the drivers do not have an option to limit color settings. Nevertheless, you can still use a relatively straight-forward OS X feature to print a document in either grayscale or black and white. Continue reading
Overcome ‘Authentication Required’ error for shared printers in OS X
If you have a USB printer available, then one of the easiest ways to make it a communal printer is to share it on the network. However, there may be times when in attempting to print to such printers, you see your print job spool to the device, but it then sits in your print queue with a small message that states something about the job being on hold with authentication required.
This issue may happen for several reasons, and generally can be fixed with a few quick adjustments: Continue reading
Printers not behaving? Reset them and start from scratch
While printing has somewhat taken a back seat to the use of PDFs and other electronic forms of communication, there are still plenty of times when printers are regularly used; however, along with this there may be times when your printers will not behave correctly and refuse to print. Sometimes you might get an error specifying a problem with your printer setup, but at other times the print job may sit in your print queue and not move. Continue reading
Add shortcuts for the PDF menu items in Print dialogues
When you print any document in OS X, you can manage the print job as a PDF by accessing the small PDF menu at the bottom-left of the print panel, where you can open the PDF in Preview, save it as a PDF to disk, and embed it in an e-mail or chat message, among other options. While the PDF menu itself is not inconvenient, accessing it does require you use the mouse by default; however, you can also assign custom hotkey shortcuts to access these items even quicker. Continue reading
Create a service to print selected text in OS X
If you have used Windows systems you might have found its ability to print a selection of text to be rather useful, and may wish for this feature to be in OS X. Unfortunately, Apple does not have this as an option by default; however, Apple does support the creation of custom services using Automator, and if needed, you can make one that will allow you to do this, and then bind it to a hotkey so you can quickly invoke it. Continue reading
Print documents directly from the OS X Finder
If you regularly have documents you need to print, then you can do so directly from the Finder. While you might think of first opening a document in a program and then choosing Print from the File menu, you can also do this in the Finder by selecting the document and then pressing Command-P. This will open the document and then immediately invoke the print command on it. Continue reading