More on on Virtual PC 6.x printing: Workarounds
More on on Virtual PC 6.x printing: Workarounds
Last Friday we posted a note from Microsoft's technical support department stating that emulated printing may be addressed in a future release, as well as delivering two potential workarounds:
- Rollback your operating system from MacOS 10.3 to MacOS 10.2.8
- Use PDF printing software in Windows; it acts as a printer driver but saves the output to a PDF document instead of printing it to paper. You can then move this document to the Mac side and print it using the Apple Preview application."
We've since received a number of additional suggestions for how to use emulated printing in Virtual PC 6.x under Panther.
Russell Hobbie suggests "In Windows 98 at least (the only Windows system I have experience with) the print dialog box gives the option of printing to a postscript file. If this filed is stored in a shared folder, one can go to Panther and drag the .ps file to the printer icon in the dock. It prints just fine. This surprised and pleased me, since I thought panther uses PDF for its printing."
Bill Malgieri writes "I had a problem getting VPC to print using emulation and network in Windows 98. I managed to get it to work by setting up an LPR printer in Windows using a shareware program called ACITS LPR Remote Printing for Windows. If you have a network printer it works great and is several times faster then emulated printing."
As Bob Gregg points out, you can also use PDF printing software in Windows; it acts as a printer driver but saves the output to a PDF document instead of printing it to paper. You can then move this document to the Mac side and print it using the Apple Preview application. Examples of this type of software are:
The first item, PDF995, is free, and has been confirmed to work in this situation by a number of readers.
UPDATE: Burt Spielman offers some instruction for how to use PDF 995 "Run both installers on the PC side in Virtual PC, then go to Start > Settings > Printers and make pdf995 your default PC printer. Enable folder sharing in Virtual PC. This asks you to select a Mac folder to be shared with the PC, which then appears on the "Z:" drive of the PC.
"When you print from Virtual PC, you now create a PDF document that you can direct to the shared folder on the "Z:" drive. If that doesn't work, then save the PDF doc to the default "pDF" folder on the "C:" drive, then move it to the shared folder. (When you print, Internet Explorer launches and you see an ad for the software maker, but you can buy a key that will eliminate the ads. I've found that I can close the IE window before the ad even displays.)
"On the Mac side, print the resulting PDF file (in the shared folder you selected) from Preview, Acrobat or Adobe Reader.Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
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