Another Mac question/wireless networking

OK, I have a paper due tomorrow. I have to type it up on my laptop because my new iMac doesn’t have any office programs on it (unless there is a hidden one; I need formatting and the trial of MS Office lacks printing capabilities). The catch is I need to print it on (my also brand new) Canon MP500 printer which is hooked up to my Mac. I have been working on networking my iMac and my laptop all day, and for the most part have been successful. Both computers see each other and I am currently transferrring all my pictures over to the Mac wirelessly.

My problem is I cannot get my printer networked to my laptop. I have printer sharing turned on in the Mac. I figure there is something else I need to do. On my laptop I am using the “adda printer” wizard, and was successful doing this wireless network thing with my old HP printer.

Anyone have any ideas I can try?

Is the laptop a Mac, too? If so (and maybe even if not), have you considered just plugging the printer into it long enough to print?

If it’s a Windows laptop, this may be hard. In Tiger (OS X 10.4) it’s easier to set up a Mac to use a Windows printer than it is to set up another Windows machine to share it. But the other way around is tough.

Other possibilities:

  • The new Mac should have a demo of iWork '05 or '06 on it (depending on exactly when you bought it). The “Pages” app in there will open a Word document, and print it.

  • If the demo version of Word can export to PDF, do that and print from Preview.

  • Save the document as RTF rather than DOC, and the built in TextEdit can open and print it. (This is probably the easiest way, actually). This won’t work if the paper contains graphics.

  • You can download OpenOffice for the Mac; which gives you a free Office Suite which will open Word documents. There’s something called NeoOffice J, too - but I don’t think it works on the Intel Macs, yet.

  • I’m fairly sure Microsoft has a view-and-print-only version of Word that’s free, called “Microsoft Office Viewer” or something like that.

  • Worst case; burn the doc file on a CD and take it to Kinkos or your local equivalent.

Oh yeah, forgot one. If the new Mac isn’t an Intel Mac, it probably has something called “AppleWorks” on there – that can also open and print a Word document.

I’d try just moving the doc file to the Mac, right click on it, and see what’s listed as “Open With.”

The laptop is a Windows laptop. Thanks for the suggestions; I really want this to work.

What I will probably end up doing is typing up the parper (yep - haven’t even gotten that far) in Word, then put it on my flash drive and print it off at school tomorrow morning.

I really want to network this printer, though. I go to system prefs, click on fax & printers and make sure my printer is shared. then I go to the sharing folder and try to tick off the windows sharing checkbox there…the little start buton shows up but it won’t let my click it, thus the check box won’t allow itself to be checked.
I just feel there is something I’m overlooking.

Have you checked the Firewall tab to make sure that you haven’t blocked incoming connections to Printer sharing?

The firewall is off. i’m giving up for tonight; I really need to get this paper done.

However, I do have a couple Mac questions:

What is a .dmg (disk image) file? I have a few on my desktop from Firefox and Thunderbird when I downloaded them. Should I just leave them where they are?

How can I do a print screen on a mac?

I d/l’ed Open office, but i can’t get the app to open up? I click on the icon on the desktop but it just opens a finder window with another open Office icon (the seagull one), then that icon jumps down to the dock but never opens up…I must be doing something wrong (like not knowing how to properly install programs). right?

Windows and Macs don’t always play nice when it comes to networking. At any rate, here is the info you asked about Boscibo

Dmg Files - a .dmg file is more or less a disk image/compressed file, similiar to a zip file really. After double-clicking on it, it’ll appear as though it’s a “disc” in your computer (this is generally what is referred to as “mounting” a file). In other words, when you uncompress a zip file, it leaves it’s insides all over a predetermined directory OR in the directory it sits in, after you eject/unmount a mounted dmg file, the compressed file remains, no file pieces (besides what you clicked and dragged to a directory, like your applications folder).

Concerning Print Screen/Screen captures - apple + shift + 3 will take a screenshot of your entire screen, it’ll put a pdf on your desktop. apple apple + shift + 4 will allow you to select a region of your screen and make a shot.

It’s a “virtual disk” - when you double click it, the OS will mount it as though it were an inserted disk. You can run programs off them if you like, but usually you just copy/install the program from the virtual disk wherever you want it. After that, you no longer need the .dmg file. Almost all Mac software is distributed this way now.

Use the Grab application in your applications folder. Command-4 used to do this as well, I don’t know if it still does. The screen capture will be a TIFF file in your documents directory, and will open in Preview if you double click it.

I don’t use OpenOffice, but here’s my guess: The icon on the desktop is a .dmg (see above). When you click it, it will open the disk. The icon there is the program: drag it to your Applications folder (that’s all you need to do to install on a Mac – drag it someplace). Double-click it from there.

If it still doesn’t work, check to see that you have X11 installed (it’s in the original Mac install disk, you should be able to add it without reinstalling the whole OS). OpenOffice isn’t a “real” mac applications, it’s built on some nonstandard (to the Mac) Unix tools. I’ll try and install it now and tell you what I get.

Yep, mine bounced once, then opened the X11 app, flickered for a bit, and then started launching an installer.

All in all, probably not worth the effort if you don’t already have X11 installed. Use one of the other methods, and wait for the NeoOffice J version this summer that will support the Intel Macs (or buy Pages and KeyNote for $79).

Another possibility: the AbiWord word processor ( http://www.abisource.com/download/ ) runs natively on Windows, Linux, and OS X; it also opens Word files. As long as you don’t have crazy esoteric stuff going on, it should translate fine into AbiWord’s own format, allowing you to open and print your paper on your Mac.

(It’s a fine piece of software overall, too.)

Note: AbiWord is a true, native PPC OS X application; it doesn’t need X11 and should run fine with Rosetta on the Intel macs.

I want to thak you all for the help. AbiWord looks good and will probably work for future papers, but since I typed the paper up in Word the formatting looked a little funky when I moved it to the iMac and printed it from AbiWord, plus my headers didn’t print. They also didn’t print when I tried it in .rtf. I’ll have to print this one at school.

Now I can’t drag open Office to the trash - it changes the trash bin to an eject icon, but I have ejected it and it won’t eject. Any advice?

What are you trying to drag to the trash? The virtual disk? It won’t eject if there are any files open on it, and you might have some from trying to launch without X11 – although it should tell you why it won’t eject.

Just reboot the system, it will clean that up for you. If the system won’t reboot, hold down the power button for five seconds to force it (you shouldn’t have to do this very often.)

Thanks, that did it. :slight_smile:

I want to update this - I spent almost all evening trying to get my printer shared (BTW - this is an Intel mac, and the printer is a Canon MP500). i can share files betwen the two computers, and even got as far as being able to see my printer in my ‘add printer’ dialog box on my laptop, but when I clicked on the printer Windows would always kick back with an ‘invalid printer name’ message. :mad:

After looking around on the Apple discussion boards I found a printer networking utility called Bonjour, available on Apple’s site. I downloaded it, ran it, and now it all works. :smiley: