Apple has introduced a ‘print’ button onto iPads, iPhones and iPods to allow you to print directly to a printer from your iOS device. Unfortunately you need a special AirPrint enabled printer. Thankfully there is a free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ that allows you to print to any printer, here’s where to get it and how to use it.
There appears to be a compatibility issue with Mac OSX lion and lots of printers. (Talked about here on the apple support pages) The printer may or may not work properly, but you will get an error that says “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.”
When I try to print on my new Fuji Xerox document C4350 last week I got an error saying “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” and the printer would not even print. If you play around with a different print setting (e.g. USB, Jetdirect, LPD, IPP) you may be able to get the printer working (still with the error!) till Apple repairs the problem. Here’s how I got my Xerox printer working. Continue reading »
This hint is not strictly Macintosh, but it’s so good I have to write it up. Did you know you can get what they call a Continuous inking system (CIS) for most big name inkjet printers? It continually feeds the ink into the printer so you don’t have to change the cartridges! You can see the big containers of ink in the photo above – they sit next to the printer.
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Combining pdf documents on an Apple computer is easy. Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion (the latest versions of Macintosh OSX) all have the ability to merge two different pdf documents together and even move pdf pages within a pdf file. There are lots of websites offering to sell software to do it, but you don’t need a third party program to do it – it’s built right in to OS X for free. Things have changed to make it a little easier with Mountain Lion so I’ve made a new post on merging two pdfs in Mountain Lion here, but for OSX prior to Mountain Lion, just follow the instructions below!
To join two or more pdf files together using Preview (the standard pdf viewer in OS X) simply open the pdf file in preview, open the thumbnail view (Shift-⌘-D), and then drag a second pdf ON TOP OF an existing page thumbnail. (It must be on top of the thumbnail, see the pictures below). The two documents will merge into one. Then save the new combined file. Read on for step-by-step instructions.
My friend Dave has just moved across to mac and he tells me that in Microsoft publisher you can use a booklet template to make a booklet. By booklet I mean A4 pages folded in half to make an A5 booklet that you staple in the middle. To do this all the pages need to be re-ordered, for example, page 8 goes near page 1, page 2 near page 7 and so on. Publisher did this automatically.
With Pages in OS X there is no such built in option to do this automatically, but there is a great little program called ‘create booklet’ that will do it for you when you go to print the document.
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Canon have finally released drives for Snow Leopard for their Image runner printers!!!
For some reason they are not available on the Australian Canon site, but you can download them from here. The file is called CanonPPD_v2.80.zip and it contains the drivers for all the Image Runner printers. Read on for how to install. Continue reading »
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