Printing

[ptkelly]

For two years I failed. I have an HP WiFi printer and an Asus and Acer chromebooks. I struggled with printing and while I occasionally got a print I was never quite sure how and normally couldn't print. I would copy files to a flash drive and go to Office Depot to print.

I used three HP apps to print and none worked consistently. My HP printer is WiFi but not "Cloud Ready" or Google approved.

Then, yesterday, I received an email with a 1099 for the IRS. This is always a bitter and terrifying time of the year for me. Just for a bit of bitter irony I hit CTRL/P while looking at the 1099. My god, it printed perfectly.

I went to a letter I'd sent my kids, with a few photos, and told it to print. It did. Then I went to a website and it printed, too. Perfect.

I swear it's nothing I did so I'm assuming it's something that has changed with Chrome OS. So, if you do have been plagued with failure at printing, give it another try.

It worked for me. It's flawless.

 

[B. Diddy]

Yeah, this happened some time last year, I think, when Chrome gained the native ability to print over wi-fi, without Cloud Print: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/google-is-killing-google-cloud-print/. It surprised me as well! The only complaint I have is that the tab you're in while printing freezes until the print job is complete, where I think with Cloud Print, you could continue to do stuff in that tab while waiting for the print job.

 

[ptkelly]

I'm not sure what you mean but I never got Cloud Print to work consistently enough that waiting was anything but an eternity. My print jobs are usually no more than three pages but there is no waiting for it to start printing and as soon as I hear the printer across the room making noise I can move to something else. I printed email messages, comic strips which I'd copied to a document in Google Docs and, of course, Google Docs I had in the cloud.

I am very happy. I'm left with only one significant complaint. I'd like to save documents such as tax information, contract negotiations, and bid proposals on a thumb drive, hard drive, or the SSD and not in the cloud. It's not that I don't trust Google. Oh, well, yes it is and if it wasn't they get hacked more often than I do.

I have been told before that it depends on the app I'm using but no one has specified a free word processing app that will save to disk and not to cloud. I tried WPS with and if it does I couldn't figure out how. Same for Office Suite.

 

[Rukbat]

I have been told before that it depends on the app I'm using but no one has specified a free word processing app that will save to disk and not to cloud. I tried WPS with and if it does I couldn't figure out how. Same for Office Suite.

Check the settings in the app for the saving location. It may not come set to local storage by default, but most apps that can store data can store it locally.