Printing from XP -> OS X 10.4

[Cross posted to and for archival purposes…]

Last night I ran into an interesting issue with regards to printing from an XP machine to an iMac running OS X 10.4, and I thought people here would want to know about it.

First, the Mac has an HP Deskjet 952c connected to it, using the queue name which was automatically created when the printer was plugged in.

Second, the client machine is running XP SP2 and has simply mapped to the printer over the network and has the appropriate driver loaded.

The problem I was observing is that the XP machine would send a print job, and the Mac would report it as completed, but nothing would have actually been printed.

The solution to this problem is to access the CUPS web-based management stuffs (http://localhost:631) and edit the printer so that it’s queue name has no spaces in it. In my case I just removed the spaces and replaced them with underscores. Next I deleted the mapped printer on the XP machine and reconnected it, and everthing was fine.

I’ve been told by a friend that OS X Server actually warns a user about such potential issues when creating a print queue, but I can say that the client version of the OS doesn’t present the user with any sort of notification.

So, yeah. I hope that helps someone.