How can I print to nearby printer from my Mac?

This is one of my favorite features of the Mac system, actually, the ability for it to see what printers are on the network and available, and let you really easily pick the printer you want, even without leaving the program you're currently using. Way easier than going to some control panel and looking for drivers!

Even better, through a printing system called CUPS (common Unix printing system), Mac OS X systems know about thousands of different printers from dozens of different vendors. No driver CD involved.

Assuming the printer is visible on the network (which can be done by having a printer hooked up to a server and "shared" on the network, either Mac or PC, or by having a LAN-friendly or even wifi-friendly printer.

I'll demonstrate this in a local office where I hadn't set up any printing capability, but needed to print a page from Google Chrome...

First off, in the app, I choose "Print..." as usual:

Then I get to the usual print dialog window, with my default printer displayed as the output device:

Before we go further, I'll note that it's perfectly acceptable - and safe - for you to submit a print job to a printer that's not available at the moment. Pick your home printer and the job will simply sit and wait for you to get home and turn the queue back on (most easily done by simply printing something else). I do that when I'm on the road and have printouts I want at home, for example.

But that's not our project here. We want to use a printer in this office. To accomplish that, I click on the printer name shown and see the pop-up menu of defined and "Nearby" printers:

I pick the Brother HL-2070N and that's all I need to do, it automatically sets things up...

Now the printer shows up as an option, and indeed, should be selected, for the current printout, as shown:

If you're fast, once you submit a print job to the nearby printer, you'll see that a printer app shows up on the Dock for this particular device:

Click on it and you can even see the queue of jobs for that particular printer:

That's all there is to it. Now that printer is set up and ready to use.

Tip: Rename the printer as part of the process and give it a geographic location name, then next time you're in that office, you'll have the printer configured, ready to go, and you'll remember which is which.

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