One last issue with moving from MacBook to iPad for daily driver

[kofman13]

I am a school teacher and currently use my personal MacBook Pro retina 2015 as daily driver at work for light use, word processing, email, video watching, light spread sheets, annotating PDFs . But lately I’ve been trying out my iPad Air 2 with a Bluetooth keyboard folio case and so far I have been able to do 99% of what i do at work all on the iPad with ease except ONE crucial thing. And that is to connect to a printer/Xerox via USB and print documents.

My workplace has a big Lanier xerox machine on each floor very often i have to print copies of materials for students for tutoring and aftershoool stuff. I usually just plug in my MacBook to print via usb because to print on the network you need to print from a school computer terminal on each floor so i would have to transfer the file on a thumb drive from my MacBook to the terminal and print from there the whole thing is really a hassle so i just plug my macbook into the printer via usb and print.

Is there ANY WAY to do this with an iPad? Even if its some expensive app or expensive dongle or device i have to buy. I really have come to love using the iPad at work this past week and this is the final thing that is keeping me from using iPad as daily driver at work is usb printing. Any ideas?

I was thinking maybe getting a usb to lightning adapter so i could put the file on a thumb drive and then to the printer but idk if the xerox machine does usb flash drive printing.. yeah so any ideas?

 

[rui no onna]

There are Lightning USB flash drives.


e.g.
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-iXpand-Flash-Drive-iPhone/dp/B01CIEBU22/

 

[joeblow7777]

There's no way for you to do it over wifi? In my school board we can print from our personal devices wirelessly if you have the proper driver/app.

 

[rillrill]

I’m a teacher as well and pretty much only use iOS. Invest in an AirPrint printer that has its own WiFi, I think its direct connect or direct WiFi or something. Then print yr sheets and take them to the old copier.

 

[Lisat78]

There’s Printer Pro for non-wireless printers. You install the desktop app on a computer linked to a standard usb printer, install the app on your iPad, and away you go. You do need to be on the same wireless network and obviously the “host” computer needs to be up and running. Other than that, it works well. I use it in my workplace.

 

[mjcharlton71]

There’s Printer Pro for non-wireless printers. You install the desktop app on a computer linked to a standard usb printer, install the app on your iPad, and away you go. You do need to be on the same wireless network and obviously the “host” computer needs to be up and running. Other than that, it works well. I use it in my workplace.

I use it at home on my IPP 10.5, and it sees and can use a wired network HP Laserjet that it talks to via Bonjour. Think it’ll vary from printer to printer, but assuming the hardware supports something Printer Pro will talk to, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a computer-hosted non-wireless printer... works rather well too, and surprised me a bit as to how well.