Printing from ipad2 to Brother printer possible

[Sundancekid]

Hi guys,

Thought of sharing this bit of 'trick' on how you can print from ipad to non iprint compatiblen printer. To the Mods, if this has been posted already please just delete.... Anyway...

I have been wracking my brains out for the past few days on how i can print from my ipad to a printer direct via wifi. I have an ipad2 wifi only 64gb ipad and just like everyone else tried to search for ways to do this. First was the obvious route of buying an iprint compatible printer but the closest that i got was the Brother DPC-J715W... a network printer which can print directly from ipad thru their iPrint&Scan app for ipad. Unfortunately though... i found out it can only print from the the photo album folder... So my documents from pages, numbers and other iwork files cannot be printed, since the print utility looks for iprint compatible printers only. So then im thought of mailing my pages document as .pdf file and from my email opening the documents using the 'open in' tab... And when i opened it on iprint&scan... I was able to print it on my non iprint compatible network printer.... At long last... full print functionality on my ipad 2

 

[twerppoet]

That's one way. Here are some others.

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Some printers are directly compatible with AirPrint on the iPad. Be absolutely certain the printer supports AirPrint before buying. Some printers may require a firmware update to work. These are usually available on the manufacturers site. If you get this kind of printer you can print directly from within apps that support the feature, which is many.

iOS: AirPrint 101

Of course some of us already have printers and do not want to buy a new one. There are several ways to do this.

One is to use a printing app on the iPad.

Most (or all) other print apps can only print pictures and/or files that have been copied to that app via Open In or other method. Print n Share used to be able to print from AirPrint enabled apps if it was loaded the background. It lost this ability with iOS 5. It may still work with iOS 4 if you get it before the app is updated in the App Store. Several printer manufacturers have their own apps for their printers. In general those apps will probably have the best results, quality wise.

The second method is to load a program on the computer that will emulate an AirPrint compatible printer. Your computer must be on and have the printer available to it. The cheapest (free) is Airprint Activator. More features can be had with FingerPrint (mac and windows) and Printopia (mac only).

There is a third way. A few printers (mostly HP's again) can be set up with their own email address. PDF attachments can be sent via this address to be printed. The last review I saw (several months ago) said it could be quite slow (big files not recommended), and sometimes the emails got lost and never printed. The advantage was that you could literally send/print from anywhere you have an internet connection.

There is a new wrinkle for small business owners and those with more than one printer who would like all their printers to work, but don't want to leave a computer on all the time. The Lantronix XPrintServer is a small box that connects to your network and is supposed to detect and make all your wireless printers available to iOS as AirPrint printers. I haven't seen a full review on it yet, so do your research.