MacMost Now 541: Printing From Your iPad With AirPrint

With the most recent iOS on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch you can use AirPrint to print a document from some apps to some printers. Find out which printers are compatible and how the printing process works.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. With today's episode let's learn about AirPrint on the iPad. So, my new book My iPad 2 is out and available in stores and online. It includes sections on all the basics you need to know to use your iPad 2 including, of course, a section on printing. Let's look at that. So, first thing you need is a printer compatible with AirPrint. It's got to be a Wi-Fi printe,r of course, and you can find a list at apple.com of all printers compatible. It only shows HP printers now being compatible and I got this one HP Photosmart D110. Now, of course, once you get one of these printers the first step is to set it up. Usually if you follow the instructions to set it up as a Wi-Fi printer enter in the password for your Wi-Fi network then you may want to test it using your Mac or PC. You should be able to print to it. You may have to install some HP drivers or if it's another type of printer, the driver that comes with it. So follow the instructions make sure it's working on your computer as a Wi-Fi printer and then go and try to get working on your iPad. So to print you have to go to an application. There are no print settings in the settings App. So let's just launch Safari and go in to that and you can print any page by clicking on the button on the top and selecting print. Now it should automatically recognize any AirPrint printers that you've got attached to your network, the same network that your iPad is on. You can select the printer and it will take a look at it. If you have multiple printers on your network it allows you to jump and choose another one. You can adjust the number of copies and that's pretty much all you can set and then you can hit print. So let's look at a slightly different example, I'm going to click here on this PDF which is a printable at MacMost and I'm going to print that so you could see that it could print PDFs as well. Now I've actually got a range of pages because I'm printing a PDF and it turns out that there's only 1 page here but you can see the option you change are going still out. Now if I hit print here's what is going to happen. If I double click on the home button now I can see a print center App that appears. Now I can see a print summary and a cancel printing. In the background I can hear the actual printer going and I can see the status is printing 1 of 1 and it will show when it's completely done. Now note that different Apps work in different ways. So for instance If I go into pages and here I am this is just the sample document. I could go to the top here and there's that wrench button and that's where I'll find the print and here it gives me a range of pages that I can print just like before. So sometimes you got to go search especially with third party apps looking for the actual button that would bring up the print options. A lot of apps don't have any kind of print functionalities. Some are surprising like calendar and contacts .You can't print from those. But an application like the map, say, if you really want to print the map what you could do is hold home button and the wake/sleep button at the same time that takes a screenshot then you can go to into your photos app. In the camera roll you could find the map that you just took and you can print from there. Now, if you don't have an AirPrint compatible printer there are some ways to cheat. You have a Mac you can take some third party application that would take printer connected to your Mac and turn them into inner AirPrint printers and would show up in your iPad when you go to print. I include a list of links to some of the softwares at this post at MacMost.com. Here's a quick look at printing on the iPad with AirPrint. Until next time this is Gary from MacMost Now.

Find out more about Gary’s My iPad 2 book and look for it in stores and online.
Apple’s list of printers that support AirPrint is here. They also have a AirPrint Setup and Troubleshooting guide.
Here are three Mac applications that allow you to turn your Mac-connected printer into an AirPrint device that your iPad can print to:

Printopia 2

FingerPrint

AirPrint Activator

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 541: Printing From Your iPad With AirPrint”

Flo

13 years ago

Hey Gary,
I just bought a HP LaserJet Pro M1212nf MFP which of course doesn't appear to support AirPrint. Now I was wondering if the support just depends on Apple or if its an HP Driver Issue that they're going to update so there will be more printers available for using AirPrint?
Anyways, I just an iPhone so do those 3 apps for the Mac u listed work for the iPhone too?

Gary Rosenzweig

I think it has to be built into the printer from the start.
Yes, you can use those Mac applications for AirPrinting from any iOS device.

Daniel

Hi Gary,
Are there any ways to print contacts and texts effectively other than screenshots?

MacMan

If you have a Mac, you can save/print your texts with PhoneView (from ecamm.com, the makers of Printopia)

Not right now. But I'll bet they will add it to iOS 5.

Brian

You don't exactly need an AirPrint-specific printer. In most cases, you can simply set up printer sharing on your Mac or PC, and you can print to that shared printer via your iOS device.

Yes. I mention that at the end of the video and give links below the video.

Patrick

Sorry, this is a bit off-topic. I'm going crazy trying to find a non-jailbreak way to record video from the iPad screen. How did you do these videos?

Thanks.

You need the iPad 2. Then the HDMI adapter that Apple sells. Then something to record from HDMI. I use the Matrox MX02 mini installed in my Mac Pro.

Javi

I connect my TIme Capsule to my printer to make it wireless. I can print from my iPad 2 using this printer?

You could, using one of the mentioned 3rd-party programs. So it would be going through your Mac. I'd imagine that eventually Apple will have a way to print directly from AirPrint to a printer hooked to an Airport Extreme or TC.

Steve F

12 years ago

Gary,

Glad to see you wrote about FingerPrint. Found out about it thru a search for how to enable non AirPrint printers to print wirelessly. Has a trial to allow you to see how it works. Tried it and bought it. Immediately recognized my wireless network printers on both my iPad and iPhone. Extremely easy. Can now print directly from Mail (including the message itself) and Pages. Good app.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 541: Printing From Your iPad With AirPrint

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 541: Printing From Your iPad With AirPrint”

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