Hi,
I just installed Fusion on my MBPro. I do not have a printer connected to the Mac. Normally, I can save anything I want to print to PDF using OS X built in support of PDF.
So is there a way I can set up a printer in my virtual machine (running Windows XP Pro) to print using the OS X pdf support?
Or you could just download Cute PDF for free for Windows, then it just creates a windows PDF printer locally to the Windows VM.
Either option works.
Try using CodePoetry's CUPS-PDF to define your PDF printer in OS X and share it with Fusion guests using Apple's Bonjour. Of course Adobe Acrobat (not Reader) comes with a powerful PDF Printer as well as they are the developers of the PDF document format.
VMware has a helpful education video to setup printers with Fusion at: Learn how to make VMware Fusion work for you
Or you could just download Cute PDF for free for Windows, then it just creates a windows PDF printer locally to the Windows VM.
Either option works.
Another free PDF printer for Windows: eDocPrintPro
Thank you for the suggestions. Installing Cute PDF seems to be working fine.
Just for information/reference, I did also try the suggestion to set up a CUPS_PDF printer and share it via Bonjour. Unfortunately it was not as successful as the Cute PDF approach.
Here are the steps I followed and where I got stuck.
1. Dowload and install CUPS-PDF
2. Set up printer on Mac side via printer setup utility (just follow directions from CUPS-PDF)
3. Go to printer preferences and share the CUPS-PDF printer.
4. Download Bonjour for Windows on Windows VM.
5. Set network connection settings for virtual machine to Bridged (if it is set otherwise you don't see any printers)
6. Run Bonjour printer wizard. Select shared CUPS-PDF printer.
7. Got error message: "You do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the selected printer." Searching the community, others had this problem with hard wired printers and seemed to fix it by inserting the original driver disk (presumably windows drivers). Unfortunately that is not possible with the CUPS-PDF printer. So this where I got stuck. If anyone has any suggestions to counter this error, let me know so I can try it out. It seems like an easier way to have the printed files accesible to the Mac side.
"You do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the selected printer." Searching the community, others had this problem with hard wired printers and seemed to fix it by inserting the original driver disk (presumably windows drivers). Unfortunately that is not possible with the CUPS-PDF printer. So this where I got stuck. If anyone has any suggestions to counter this error, let me know so I can try it out. It seems like an easier way to have the printed files accesible to the Mac side.
According to the VMware educational video on printing, you may get prompted for authentication where you would enter your OS X credentials and the printer is authenticated. I don't recall how to trigger this so the credentials are stored in Windows. If you want, you can watch the video and pay attention to the part about this issue.
I watched the video as suggested but alas it did not provide any details on the authentication. However, I decided to try the Bonjour wizard again just for the heck of it. Suprisingly this time I was successful connecting to the CUPS-PDF printer (same process as before, just did not get the error message)
Unfortuantely, while the connection was a success, printing was not quite succesful. The list of completed jobs for the CUPS printer show the jobs I sent were completed. However, the files did not show up in the desktop folder on the Mac. I am not exactly sure where they went. A spotlight search for the filename did not reveal anything.
Thanks for the suggestion. I was able to download and install CUPS-PDF. I
set up the printer. In the printer preferences on the Mac side, I specified
that the printer should be shared with other computers.
Then I installed Bonjour for Windows 1.04 within the XP virtual machine. I
ran the Bonjour printer wizard and it does not find any Bonjour printers.
Have I missed a step perchance?
I found at least one step I missed. I needed to change the netowrk seeting
to be bridged. However, now I can see the cups printer but still can not
connect to it. I get an error in the windows virtual machine that says "You
do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the selected
printer."