PrinterShare Mobile Printing

With PrinterShare™ you can print directly from your phone (selected models only) to anywhere in the world including your own printer.

Nearby Printing: We can now print to Wi-Fi Printers shared on your Local Area Network (Nearby Printers). You can print from Android phone directly to a Wi-Fi printer or the one shared by your computer Bonjour service (Mac OS X has this by default) without having to install PrinterShare computer software. You don't need to log in or sign up with the system for Nearby Printing. We support wide variety of printers. If you don't see your printer in the list, PrinterShare will try to find the best match for you automatically, and in most cases it will print OK. If Nearby Printing does not work correctly with your printer, we recommend using Remote Printing instead described below.

For Remote Printing over the Internet, you need to either log in with your existing account or create new one of the fly. Then you need to find and select the printer you want to print to. The computer connected to the printer needs to have PrinterShare software installed, just like when you print from computer to computer using PrinterShare. If you intend to print to your own printer, we recommend you installing the computer software first, creating an account, sharing printer(s) and then using the same account on mobile device to login. This way you will see your shared printers automatically. In addition, from your mobile device you may look for printers shared by others, select one and print on it.

When printing from the phone the printout information is securely sent over the Internet through PrinterShare service to the target printer. Whenever possible, we try to optimize print data flow, for instance send it over local network if your mobile device and the printer are on the same LAN. Generally we recommend 3G or WiFi connection when printing from the phone to ensure performance. However, EDGE or any other slower connectivity will work as well.

Mobile phones and their software have various limitations when it comes to printing. PrinterShare Mobile allows printing photos, contacts, web pages, clipboard content and other objects depending on availability of such information on specific devices.

How it works

The Basics

Usually, you simply print from your text editor to a printer.

 

PrinterShare allows you to create virtual copy of a printer attached to another computer. Your text editor will not know about this substitution and will print as usual. Then the virtual printer will send the document over the Internet to another machine.

 

Note that the document is not sent directly to real printer. It is sent to the PrinterShare client. The client works like mailbox. You can set it up to hold the incoming documents until you are ready to review and print them, or to print automatically.

Mobile

Mobile devices, such as iPhone or Android phones, have no idea about printers and do not provide you "Print" option in applications. However, mobile PrinterShare client can access data on the device, package it as a printable document, and send for printing.

 

Some mobile PrinterShare clients are also capable of printing directly on stand-alone WiFi printers. This is an exceptional case, when document is sent to printer itself, and not to another PrinterShare client. Not all WiFi printers are supported.

 

Shared Printers

Shared Printers represent Real Printers in PrinterShare network. When you are looking for a printer to print on, you don't see Real Printers, you only see Shared Printers.

 

Of course, it is not necessary to create a Shared Printer for every Real Printer connected to your machine.

Shared Printer is maintained by PrinterShare client running on desktop computer connected to the Real Printer. If PrinterShare client is not running, Shared Printer is offline.

Delivery

If shared printer is online, printed document is uploaded directly to target machine. It is fast and secure. So, normally you want to keep your printers online.

If shared printer is offline, you still can print on it. The document will be temporarily stored on PrinterShare print server, and downloaded by receiving client as soon as it will be ready.

Not all PrinterShare clients support direct transfer. Some of them always use server-storage method, because it is simplier. You should not worry about it - there's no practical difference between the two methods, except delivery speed.