How hard do you think it would be to implement a pass-thru printing option? I envision this as follows: Parallels would install a generic print driver as part of Parallels tools. When someone printed something from Windows this driver would intercept the print job and send it back into the Mac OS Print queue for processing. This option wouldn't be something everyone would use, but it would be fantastic for people who don't want to manage printers on multiple operating systems.
I think it would be a big improvement. The only printing I've been able to make work is the agonizingly slow generic postscript printing through Bonjour. I'm trying to print to an Epson R2400 and the Epson drivers under Parallels just seem to route the print job to the bit bucket.
You can do that now simply by using the networking support. Get samba up and going, install a raw printer queue for you MAC printer (CUPs manipulation), and allow sambe to export it. Then simply install native windows drivers which talk to the raw printer queue. I have this in operation - windows can see two printers, a generic postscript (Apple laserwriter) which simply goes to the normal MAC printer queue, and a extra raw queue which when visible from windows takes the output of the windows printer driver. The MAC just dumps jobs submitted to this direct to the printer.
Be sure, we have that in our future plans and it will be released, but now there are lot of other tasks to do.
I have a wireless networked printer. It's not about how easy it is to setup a printer... it's that you HAVE to do it. Parallels is attempting to make a product that does a lot of the configuration work itself. They seem like the want to integrate a virtual windows environment into Mac OS and have them work seamlessly together. The best way to do that is built conduits between both environment and have them interact with having to setup anything. I comment Parallels on the work they are doing. I love the product, I paid for it and will continue to use as long as they continue to build cool software. Thanx!
