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Try Bonjour on your PC for using Mac printers

by Mel Martin Jul 26th 2009 at 10:00AM

It's not a hidden secret, but lots of people simply don't know about it. We mentioned it ourselves more than a year ago in answer to a reader question, but I think it's worth a revisit.

Here's my scenario. People show up at the house with PC laptops and want to print something. A boarding pass, an email, a web page. They screw around with Windows control panels trying to find the printers on my Mac network. In my case, they are both shared on a Mac Pro.

Enter Bonjour. It's the Apple answer to zero configuration networking. All you have to do is download Bonjour for Windows. There's also a 64-bit version if you need it.

Once it is downloaded you'll get a Printer Wizard, which will instantly find the printers available on your network, including the shared ones. (Make sure you are sharing them in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.)

Now when your guests want to print, they will be all set. No other drivers are needed. I now keep the Bonjour for Windows .exe on a thumb drive. I hand it to guests, and they are ready to roll.

Bonjour can do more than discover printers. Per Apple:

Bonjour for Windows includes a plugin to discover advertised HTTP servers using Internet Explorer. Click the Bonjour icon in the Internet Explorer toolbar to enable Bonjour browsing. If you have Bonjour devices on your local network with embedded HTTP (Web) servers, they will appear in the list.

It's possible you have a printer that doesn't support Bonjour, but most do. In my case an Epson and a Brother laser printer worked with no glitches. Bonjour requires Windows 2000/2003, Windows XP or Windows Vista.

If only everything in life was this simple.

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It's not a hidden secret, but lots of people simply don't know about it. We mentioned it ourselves more than a year ago in answer to a...
 

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JayTee

I can vouch for this. My wife‚ whom I love despite her insistence on using a Dell laptop‚ was struggling to set up our Brother printer shared via AEX (thank god I won that battle). I told her before she started fiddling to let me know if she needed help. 45 mins later‚ she came to me‚ I installed Bonjour for Windows and she was printing in literally 2 minutes.

It's one of those rare moments for you married folks where you can just smirk‚ cock an eyebrow and walk away whistling.

July 27 2009 at 12:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

"... will instantly find the printers available on your network, including the shared ones."

It'd be a bit of an anti-climax if it couldn't find the shared ones! I am intrigued as to which other ones it can also find though...

July 27 2009 at 3:00 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
rmeister0

One must also be aware this in some cases this won't work *at all*. I have an HP LaserJet P1006, connected to a Time Capsule. From Windows, the driver first has to be installed manually. Then, while it will appear to spool a print job, nothing actually gets to the printer.

The problem has to do with having a host-based driver that does all the rendering on the PC side and expects to communicate directly with the printer from the PC and not through a share. To this day I haven't been able to resolve the issue and, by what my Google-Fu has found neither has anyone else.

So never say something works with "every" printer because there is always an edge case out there.

July 26 2009 at 10:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Joey

You can also do this by connecting the printer to Airport Extreme or Airport Express. This way you don't have to always have a computer running to print.

July 26 2009 at 8:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Joey's comment
Joey

Also, Airport Express works just like a printer server, except it works with any USB printer. For its price, its much cheaper than a "printer server" but also provide many other function, such as a router, a switch, a wireless network extender, and remote audio (from iTunes).

July 26 2009 at 8:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jason

So what else can you do with Bonjour, other than sharing printers?

July 26 2009 at 8:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Jason's comment
Andrew TJ

Bonjour is predominately used as a service discovery mechanism in a lot of OS X software, iPhone apps and some Linux software. It hasn't really broken in to the Windows world. As it's a service discovery mechanism it's difficult to succinctly characterise what it's used in as it's useful (and used in) a wide range of applications.

To give you a real world example, on the network I'm on at the minute there's a Tivo, some printers, a variety of file shares (SMB/AFP/SFTP), SSH, a few iTunes libraries, a few websites and IM Chat being advertised.

There's also a variant called Wide Area Bonjour which as the name implies extends Bonjour to work over the internet. It's pretty neat in that it takes care of port-forwarding and what not making it just as transparent as plain Bonjour. That said, it does require a specially configured DNS server which is a significant barrier to entry for most people.

July 26 2009 at 9:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jason

So what else can you do with Bonjour other than sharing printers?

July 26 2009 at 8:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
.P@BsLpKn

LOL i just bought an Apple Airport Extreme yesterday....and i found bonjour after i tried the Windows control panel. If only i read this before i might have skipped the cursing and stuff trying to find the printer from my dads netbook XD

July 26 2009 at 4:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kiwirev

How about trying to get from my Macbook running Leopard to a Samsung CLX-2160 which is connected via USB cable to a PC box running XP. The printer can be seen on the network. If I print to it, the printer whirrs and grinds, but nothing prints. Would loading Bonjour for Windows help with that?

July 26 2009 at 3:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to kiwirev's comment
Eric P

That's a great idea for a followup article. Printing from PC to Mac is super simple thanks to Bonjour, but printing the other way is always a lot harder than it needs to be.

July 26 2009 at 7:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
maccypher

I spend hours and maybe days, trying to configure in a virtual machine (Paralles) can print in a HP wired in a iMac, using Bonjour. In the last try: ou need to make sure it's using bridged networking or Bonjour might not work!!!

July 26 2009 at 11:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Kirn

It's worth noting that this isn't just Apple's "answer" to zeroconf -- it *is* a zeroconf implementation. :) So that means that you could have a Linux box running a different zeroconf implementation and still get this benefit, with your Mac happily hopping on with Bonjour. And it's also very cool that Apple has open sourced bit parts of its zeroconf implementations across all three platforms, so even a Java programmer running Linux could take advantage of Bonjour.

That said, yes, it's not *entirely* zero configuration once you get to a different subnet if the firewall intervenes, though don't be too scared, folks - most household networks won't have any problem.

July 26 2009 at 11:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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