The other night I was trying to print from Windows XP to the HP DeskJet printer that is connected via USB to my PowerBook running Mac OS X. The strange thing was that I could hear a moment of disk activity on the Mac, but nothing printed. I finally tracked down the problem tonight. (Sure enough, the Console showed errors in the CUPS printing log.) The trick is that when you set up the printer on Windows, you must tell Windows that it's a PostScript printer, not the actual printer type.

1. On the Mac, go to System Preferences and turn on Printer Sharing and Windows Sharing.
2. On the PC, go Printers and Faxes, and step through the Add Printer wizard screens.
3. The printer is a network printer, and the name will include the Mac's IP address. Once you type the IP address with leading and trailing slashes, the actual printer name should appear. In my case, the complete network printer name was: \\192.168.0.100\DESKJET_895C

Here is a "trick" to get around the problem. When you are asked to select a printer driver (either during the Add Printer wizard, or later in the printer properties Advanced tab), specify a PostScript printer—I selected the Apple Color LaserWriter 12/660 PS, figuring that selecting a non-color printer might remove color from the output (I didn't confirm that). By getting Windows to think it's a PostScript printer, you supply raw PostScript data to the Mac, which it likes.

I would think that it would be better to specify the actual printer driver on Windows, because that would enable the printer's native features in the Windows print dialog. There's got to be a way to do that, but this trick will make things work.