Problem with Printing Solved!

By Brian Mason

I am still getting used to Mac OS X. I had to go out and get a new inkjet printer because Epson said that they were not going to make a driver for my somewhat used Color Stylus 600.

I had used my new USB printer, a Canon S630, a few times, both in the Mac OS X environment and the Classic OS 9 environment. I had just finished using it in the Classic environment, and I switched over to the OS X environment and tried to print something that appeared in my browser. Nothing happened.

Well, I immediately went into the problem-fixing mode. I will cut things short here. But I tried switching cables, I turned the printer and the computer on and off before and after each other. The printer would work in the Classic environment, but it would not work in the OS X environment.

I had the Dock in OS X hidden. That means it only appears if I move my mouse to the bottom of my screen, at which time it will pop up from the bottom of the screen. I noticed, however, if I moved my mouse to the bottom of the screen just after I asked for something to be printed, that the Print Center would appear in the Dock for a couple of seconds, and then disappear. Normally, the Print Center would remain in the Dock as long as something was printing.

When I tried to use the Canon printing utility, sometimes a dialog box would appear which would say that communication existed between my computer and the printer and sometimes it would say communication failed.

Finally, one time when the Print Center appeared in the Dock, I was able to open it before it disappeared. Looking at the menu under Queue, it appeared that the print queue needed to be started. Looking at the menu under Printers, when I opened the queue, it listed about 20 jobs that were waiting to be printed. As soon as I started the queue printing, all the jobs that I had sitting in the queue as the result of my testing efforts started printing!

I have no idea why the queue was stopped. There was one job at the bottom of the queue that indicated that there was some sort of error, and I suppose that might have been the culprit.

The listing of the jobs in the queue is not very helpful. The names are very cryptic and the size of the jobs is not shown. Nevertheless, I am going to keep the Print Center in my Dock from now on so I can monitor my print jobs. That way if a problem like this happens again, at least I will be able to see if a job simply needs to be started from the queue!