Choose your language

Choose your login

Contact us

Adding a new printer on a Mac

THE PAGE APPLIES TO:

“Help! I’m trying to add some of my new printers to my macOS server andPaperCut NG/MF is not seeing them! What’s wrong?”

If you’re running a current version of PaperCut NG/MF, all you need to do is make sure that you have the printers added at the OS level (i.e. that you’ve added the printers to the macOS Server). Since PaperCut NG/MF 18.3.3 all printers will be automatically added by default. Check out the recommendations for that over on the installing Printers on a Mac section of the manual.

Enable Auto-Import (PaperCut NG/MF v17 & above)

Since version v17, it is also possible to automatically add any new printers to Mac.

Please follow these steps to set it up:

  1. On the Mac server hosting the queue to be added/removed/ignored, in a text editor, such as Notepad, open the file: [app-path]/providers/print/mac/print-provider.conf
  2. Locate the line EnablePrinterAutoImport=off.
  3. Change off to on.
  4. Save the file.
  5. Restart the server or PaperCut Print Provider service.

The service is called papercut-event-monitor on both Mac and Linux machines. This page over explains how to restart the Print Provider service.

Note: If you are running PaperCut NG/MF v18.3.3 or later, this is enabled by default.

Importing printers before PaperCut NG/MF v17

You’ll need to re-run the script Control Printer Monitoring.command to add the new printers in PaperCut NG/MF. This script is located at: [app-path]/Control Printer Monitoring.command.

Note: Control Printer Monitoring.command was named Configure CUPS.command in older versions.

The reason for needing to run this script is that CUPS needs to be told to route printing traffic through PaperCut NG/MF first. It’s a bit inconvenient (on Windows new printers are picked up automatically), but hopefully you don’t need to run it that often.

For further information regarding the Control Printer Monitoring script, have a look here.

For a more detailed look at setting up printers on macOS, and installing PaperCut NG/MF on macO in general, we also have a walk-through video discussing the process:

This video applies to:

  • macOS 10.12 (Sierra) ↔ macOS 10.15 (Catalina)

Categories: How-to Articles , Print Queues


Keywords: apple , macos , CUPS , osx , printer configuration wizard

Comments

Last updated February 15, 2024