Printing

I had tried to find out beforehand if my Canon s500 printer was supported by the base station's USB printer sharing. It is listed as an OS X compatible printer, but is not listed in Apple's printer sharing compatibility list, although the s520 is. I first connected it via USB directly, and OS X recognized it and had a Canon driver ready. I connected it to the base station, and the base station recognized it after all, and I was able to add that and print wirelessly. For now, one PC still connects to it through the parallel cable and shares it to the other PC as I had it before. Presumably, I can get the PCs to use the printer over the network by connecting to it as if it were served by an HP JetDirect print server. This would be nice, but we'll see since PCs aren't supposed to be able to connect to it. It was part of why I went with the Apple base station rather than another, because the built-in print server is worth a good deal, and not many other wireless routers have them.

After much searching, I found a post on macosxhints.com that had a link to a Fuji/Xerox page for a driver utility for one of their printers, which is just an LPR port driver for Windows95/98/ME (2000 and XP have this built-in). You set this to the JetDirect setting, which appears to be just LPR over port 9100. It worked fine.

I have noticed some alignment errors in printing. I've mostly just printed from Safari, so I don't know if it's just Safari or the printer driver itself. Some of the graphics are shifted in vertical alignment on the printout, like the round edges of buttons are not aligned with the middle part that contains the text.

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