Printing from home from your iPhone or iPad is now a breeze. A large part of the modern (network) printers can handle AirPrint. But ‘fine-tuning’ your prints is not possible with this, but you can with the Printer Pro app.
AirPrint is a driverless printer protocol from Apple. It means that if your printer is AirPrint-compatible (which is a large part of today’s network printers), you can simply print directly from your iPhone, iPad, Mac and so on without having to install a driver at all. Do you have an older printer that can’t handle AirPrint? No drama in itself if you have a NAS from Synology, for example. This turns any regular printer into a printer with AirPrint capabilities. There are also individual devices for sale that offer exactly that possibility. In short: hassle-free universal printing within the Apple ecosystem has not been a utopia for years.
Printer Pro
Even so, AirPrint – however user-friendly – ​​is not perfect. For example, you can’t ‘tweak’ your prints from your iPad or iPhone. By which we mean tricks like, for example, printing multiple pages on one sheet of paper to save paper (and time). That’s exactly why the Printer Pro tool comes from readdle €7.99 excellent. In addition to giving you much more control over your printing on paper, it can also be used to create PDFs. iOS/iPadOS can of course already do this from home, but in the case of Printer Pro, the aforementioned fine-tuning extras are also present.
Add Printer
Let’s first set up Printer Pro for the regular printer. After purchase and installation, start the app and click + Add printer in the main panel on the right. Choose one of the available printers on your network. We note that Printer Pro also handles various non-AirPrint-capable printers. In other words: in that case you don’t even need the intermediate step of the NAS as an AirPrint bridge. Be sure to try this app out before spending money on hardware solutions, we would say. In addition, if you have your desktop PC almost always on, you can set it up as a print server, so that printing from Printer Pro always succeeds. In short: Printer Pro is much more than just an app that puts an extra layer over AirPrint, it is actually a kind of complete printer driver for Apple’s mobile legion devices. For the rest of this article, it doesn’t matter whether you use the app as a substitute printer driver or as an intermediate step for an AirPrint command.
Select the desired printer
Once you have added one or more printers, the printing fun can begin. Select the printer(s) you want to use in the column on the right. If you select more than one, you can choose later. Printer Pro is now ready to use.
In our example you can see that the Brother printers can be controlled directly, while the OfficeJet is a native AirPrint printer. Incidentally, both Brothers are also available as an AirPrint printer via the NAS, but we have deliberately not added that here to keep it clear. Incidentally, experience shows that printing to AirPrint printers is slightly faster than printing to a non-AirPrint-capable copy.
Share to Printer Pro
For example, to print a web page or other document from an app, share the file or page in question to Printer Pro. Use the share button in an app for this. In the case of Safari, this is the well-known example in the top right of the screen. Then choose the option Print with Printer Pro, select your printer and tap print. If you already had an AirPrint printer in use, this feels like a somewhat pointless detour, but read on: your benefits will also be discussed! In case you don’t have an AirPrint printer, it is a completely new possibility to be able to print directly from your iPad or iPhone. So ‘great success’ in advance! Make sure to check whether everything is printed as intended, that very first time. Sometimes a printer prints nothing at all, or a big mess. In that case you still have to look for an AirPrint server or print via your PC or Mac via the print server option that you can install there as a companion of Printer Pro.
The perks
As promised, it is now interesting for everyone, including those who have an AirPrint printer. Because in that case you do not immediately press the Print button after a partial assignment to Printer Pro, but on More Options. You will now see a preview of what will be printed.
Interlude
Not bad, that preview, because sometimes Printer Pro – especially with web pages sometimes also presents a problem. That has everything to do with that annoying cookie wall that we are now legally obliged to treat. It regularly appears pontifically over your document. It is not possible to remove or accept, this is really a preview, rendered by the internal browser of Printer Pro. And you can’t ‘reach’ there to click the wall away. In that case, the AirPrint print server turns out to be useful, because from there you can print cookie-free – because directly from your browser. You also sometimes see that sharing from other apps loses some of the formatting. If you don’t want all that, you can also create a PDF from iOS and then share it to Printer Pro, then everything works perfectly. To do this, press – in Safari for example – the share button and then Print. Spread two fingers on the preview. Then tap the share button again and choose again Print with Printer Pro. This time, the document is transferred as a PDF. Which means if the cookie whine wasn’t visible in your browser, it won’t be in your preview either!
fine tune
Well, we assume that you are now on More Options clicked. You will now see a – hopefully successful – preview of your document. And a series of buttons on the right with which you can fine-tune things. Turn pages if necessary or have several printed on one A4 sheet. All options that you can’t manage with the standard printing method in iOS and (or) iPadOS. Choose your printer at the top right for PDF Printer, then you can convert the end result to PDF exactly as shown in the example. This can be useful if you want to email people a somewhat more eco-friendly version of your document, for example.
History
Printer Pro saves all documents transferred to it by default. That has both advantages and disadvantages. If you want to regularly make new prints of an item in the app, it is very handy. But there will undoubtedly also be things that you only print once in your life. Remove it every now and then, to prevent the app and its storage space from growing out of its scope.
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