Printing from a MAC to a printer connected to a WIndows PC

Last night I tried to print from my MAC to a printer that is attached to my PC across the network. How hard can this be?

My main concern is that I needed to get a driver for the MAC that would support my printer, which is a Canon i560 and was purchased within the past year or two. Off to the Canon web site and there was a driver for the printer, so I downloaded it.

To make sure I was not chasing more than one problem at a time, I connected the printer to the MAC and installed the printer driver. I then added a printer and selected the Canon drivers and then the specific one for the i560 that I just installed. The sample document printed fine.

One step to go, reconnect the printer to the PC and then just add another printer and this time select a network printer and the same i560 driver I just installed.

When adding the network printer, I could only see the drivers that came installed with the operating system and not the one that I just installed. I spent about two hours trying to find the driver and there was even an option to go out and point to the driver file directly, much like Windows. No luck, could just not find it.

Called the Canon support line and they said the driver is not "network" compatible. What does that mean? What has to be different with the driver? I have been doing computers and networks for 20 years -- you take the output from the driver and instead of sending it to a USB attached printer, you send it to a queue on the MAC, send it across the network to a queue on the PC, and then to the printer.

So for now I am stuck with not being able to print, but I have not given up the fight. You can see a thread on the issue here -- MACFIXIT.COM