I recently helped a friend with setting up a Macintosh laptop for printing to a wireless printer. The point of that included permitting the household's iPad to print, something I had believed to be possible in principle but had not investigated as yet. Turns out that printing from iPhones and such--wirelessly!--is possible; in some cases however, use of non-Apple software is necessary. This little "paper" will focus on the non-Apple side of the question.
Apple has a new wireless printing standard called "AirPrint".
Unfortunately, AirPrint works only with a fairly small number of AirPrint-ready wireless printers; the printer in question was wireless but non-AirPrint-ready.
Canon, Epson, Hewlett Packard, and Lexmark all offer free iOS apps for printing wirelessly--even to printers that are not themselves wireless devices as such. (There are quite a few pay apps, too, offering combinations of printing, scanning, and "cloud" storage. I have ignored those.)
This is about a particular non-Apple application that I have installed and tested on my old iPod touch, printing to a 3-year-old Hewlett Packard all-in-one.
• HP, for example: <http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-printing-questions/HP-DESKJET-3050-all-in-one-j610a/td-p/843985>
Note the confusion on that page; an app is required:
So: Install (and register) the appropriate app, "Share" your printer to the network (in System Preferences), (there may be other steps,) and your iTouch (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) can see and print to it when on your home network (and your computer is awake). (It's possible to print to your home printer when away, too, but that requires some fairly complicated setup--and that the computer remain awake while you are away from the house.)
Instead of adding a global Print command; instead, the HP app can print some kinds of material for which it has built-in viewers. I have tested it using my second-generation iPod touch, and it printed to my non-AirPrint, non-wireless printer; I was gratified to receive only a moment later the printout of one of the pictures stored on my device.
Presumably, wireless printers would not need for the computer to be awake.
For most purposes, either syncing or e-mailing content from the hand-held to the big computer is superior for any number of reasons (and will be required for some kinds of content). However, when a hard copy of a few common types of things is desired immediately, this is _the cat's pajamas_: Launch app--Select content--Send print job to printer while walking toward computer room--Retrieve printout from tray--enjoy.
By the way--we did establish wireless printing from the MacBook to the HP wireless printer.
All excellent!
Mark_
10:39 22 September 2011
