Printing to a Local Printer while using a Remote Mac via Screen Sharing

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Printing to a Local Printer while using a Remote Mac via Screen Sharing

Hi Everyone,

I am trying to work out this issue. We have an office where some staff work remotely, connecting from their Mac at home to their office iMac through the built-in VNC / ScreenSharing function to use some specialist software. There is a need to print using this software, but the users want to print to their home printer, not the printer that's available in the office. As their remotely connected to the office iMac, I would imagine that to print to the home or another remotely-connected printer we would need to add that printer to the work iMac as a printer itself. I imagine that port forwarding would help here.

Is there any simple way to allow a user that's connected remotely to print through Screen Sharing the the physical mac that they're using, rather than the printers that are connected to the iMac they are connecting to?

I know the question is tricky to ask correctly, sorry about that. I've attached an image to help. Any help and guidance very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Tim

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Feb 21, 2016 7:54 PM

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Answer 1

To_Mi

Level 4

1,202 points

Feb 22, 2016 6:42 AM in response to THDTim

These are just my idea - not fully tested in remote connection.

I'm not sure the followings work for your configuration ( network / OS X version )

(A) Use PDF - may not be simple as you expected, but good chance to work.

On the office mac, use save-as-PDF on the print dialog.
On the office mac, select the PDF file in Finder and drag-and-drop to the folder on the remote mac.
On the remote mac, print the PDF file to the remote printer

(B) Use PDF with shared folder - may not be simple enough yet

Setup shared folder on either mac. Make sure the folder can be accessed from the other mac.
On the office mac, use save-as-PDF on the print dialog to create PDF file in the shared folder
On the remote mac, print the PDF file in the shared folder to the remote printer.

(C) Use printer sharing

Turn on Printer Sharing on the remote mac.
Setup the office mac to use the shared printer. Printer-and-Scanner of SystemPreferences will show the printer as "printer-name @ remote-mac-name" if it is available to use.
After completing above steps, the office mac should be able to print to the remote printer in the same way as local office.

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