There is no paper/quality tab when I bring up the Printing Preferences. If I right click on the printer and select "Properties", I see that under the features, it says "Color: No".

Prints fine in color from Mac OS X. Hmmm.

Could the ThinPrint drivers be picking up color capability out of the Mac's PPD file for the printer? I've noticed default paper settings being picked up from there.

Bingo. The PPD does not indicate ColorDevice. I hacked the ppd to add the ColorDevice command, and the thinprint drivers now think they can print in color.

The PDE files don't seem to matter to ThinPrint. The .ppd files do. So the problem isn't as much with ThinPrint as the way the ppd is set up on the Mac.

It looks to me like some printers don't have a very useful ppd file - for example, the ppd for the Epson printer I have doesn't have the right default paper size or color device setting. I had to hack it to add the right PostScript comments.

On the Mac, add the following line to the .ppd file for your printer found in /etc/cups/ppd (oh, save a copy of the original first).

*ColorDevice: True

A good place for this is early in the file, preferably before the first line that starts with *OpenUI, as the following example shows:

*PPD-Adobe: "4.3"
*%Auto Generated PPD from Tioga workset
*FormatVersion: "4.3"
*FileVersion: "1.0"
*LanguageEncoding: UTF-8
*LanguageVersion: English
*PCFileName: "AutoMake.PPD"
*Manufacturer: "EPSON"
*Product: "(EPSON CX4800 Series (1))"
*LanguageLevel: "3"
*PSVersion: "(3011.104) 0"
*ModelName: "EPSON CX4800 Series (1)"
*ShortNickName: "EPSON CX4800"
*NickName: "EPSON CX4800 Series (1)"
*cupsVersion: 1.1
*cupsManualCopies: True
*cupsFilter: "application/pdf 0 /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/PrintJobMgr/Contents/MacOS/PrintJobMgr"

*ColorDevice: True

*% Paper Handling ===================
*OpenUI *PageSize: PickOne

There are entries in the ppd that control the default paper selection and printable area. They may be set to A4. You can get those defaults more reasonable. For example, there's probably a line in the PPD that's similar to

*DefaultPageSize iso-a4

and a group of lines that say

*PageSize xxx/yyy:
...
*End


Simply change that DefaultPageSize to one of the "xxx" entries (before the slash) that represents the default page size you want.

The same goes for DefaultPageRegion, DefaultImageableArea, and DefaultPaperDimension settings if they exist.


I'm afraid if you want those function to work, you'll have to stop using the ThinPrint functionality (disabling Printers in the VM's Settings), logically connect the USB printer to the VM when you wish to use it, and use the Canon drivers and other software in the VM. PPD settings don't control those utility functions.

Note that USB devices can only be in use by one OS at a time (either the guest or the Mac).