So I know some of you were wondering what my latest flickr pool was all about but clicking around you probably figure it out fast.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of brain power on getting an HP C5180 all-in-one scanner, copier, printer, photo printer, hipsterpda authoring tool. It wasn’t pleasant. In fact, it was pretty horrifying considering that the latest drivers and software on the HP website are badly broken.

Also, I know I’ve been busy lately. I assure you this is more related to work and family than a terrible fixation on a certain gnome, though I’m starting to get teased a little by my friends for such things. So onward and upward.

This guide is designed to help the owner of an HP All-in-One model printer (or any other HP printer and perhaps any printer that will feed 3×5 cards) print cards using Mac OS X.

Assumptions:

You’re an awesome hipster and have a deck of cards in PDF format, 1-up, to prove it.

You have a printer similar enough to the HP Photosmart C5180 that you can fake having one or have already cleared off room for your own. (It is worth looking at—Epson doesn’t have a printer of this capability in the same price range at the moment and my RX500 died because I used stupid third-party inks that blew out my heads. It also prints photos very well though the scanner software sucks and HP has issues with QA of their software apparently.)

You have yourself a nice place to put all those cards, such as a Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase, or a Levenger Rope Case.

You have a Mac running OS X 10.4+. I only say that because I’m not sure if the UI elements look the same in Panther. Its been a while. Maybe you should upgrade.

You have a stack of index cards. I get mine at a local office supply store (Morrison Office Supply on Thayer Street, Providence Rhode Island, US) because I just love the owner and his shop. You can probably get them just about anywhere though. I like plain ones. I go for a nice weight that isn’t too stiff and isn’t so flimsy that they’re going to easily tear. The HP lets you put them in the main tray. Don’t try using the photo paper tray. It doesn’t work. They’re too small for that, but the big huge tray lets you accommodate smaller sizes. Go figure.

When you load the cards, you can’t even see them anymore. It makes it hard to know how many you have left. I’m usually only printing 10-20 cards at a time though, so it isn’t like I’m raking the leaves while my printer sits waiting for cards.

Preview.app

Preview.app is the preferred way for me to open the hipsterpda DIYplanner templates. It is a great PDF viewer all-around anyway. First things first, open the document.

File » Page Setup

Make a custom page size. I self-assigned 0.00 inch margins. This is roughly similar to 0.00 centimeter margins.

I called mine “Hipsta” and set the page size to width 3 inches by height 5 inches.

Easy.

You’re going to want to set your Paper Size to that custom Hipsta selection you just made.

You’re also going to want to change the scale a bit. I got the best results at 95% but I’ve had great luck with 96% as well. 100% is too big, and your cards will get the edges cut off by the margins, even though they’re at 0.00. Ping me if you get a better result than this. I’m happy with the results I’m getting, but would probably prefer getting a larger print onto 3×5.

So yeah, I set mine to 96%.

Punch the big OK button.

File » Print

Here we go.

Name your preset.

Create a new preset. Call it “HP Trying” or whatever you want to call it. Something like “I hope this works!” is fine, too. Don’t get cocky with your naming of this preset, I think it interprets assertiveness as a threat.

Save your preset.

You’re going to save your preset after every change we make, so get used to it.

Go to Layout

Select the drop-down menu below Presets.

Pick Layout, and make it look like this:

Save your preset.

Paper Handling

Select the drop-down menu below Presets and select Paper Handling.

Leave everything as-is, but change “Scale to fit paper size:” and change that to Hipsta.

Save your preset.

Paper Type/Quality

Select the drop-down menu below Presets and select Paper Type/Quality.

I like to use Plain paper. I leave quality on Automatic. I use sRGB even though the cards are all grayscale now. I think they used to have some with little faint splashes of color. Or my Epson was so cracked out that it was injecting some color where none should be. That doesn’t seem all that unlikely. I really screwed that printer up. That’ll learn me.

Do you see Paper | Color Options | Ink?

Click on Ink.

The middle setting bleeds too much. I nudge it down a peg. Your mileage may vary.

Save your preset.

Copies & Pages

Select the drop-down menu below Presets and select Copies & Pages. Set the number of copies you want, and what page-range you want. It will probably be 10-20 copies of Page X.

Don’t forget to do this because if you don’t, you’ll hurt yourself scrambling to launch Printer Setup Utility to stop the print job you just kicked off lest you get showered with 84 index cards.

This printer cranks them out fast. Like little ninja throwing stars they’ll spray at you. Heads-up.

Now what?

That’s it, slacker. Now that you have a saved preset you can dig through your 1-up PDF hipsterpda templates and find the one you want, hit Print, change to your hipster-pda printing Preset you created (Please Work, HP Trying, or Tickle Me Merlin) and assign how many copies you want of that card.

If you come back and print more later after having closed the document, you have to pick Page Setup again to tell Preview.app you’re printing to Hipsta again. It will not remember that on a document-by-document basis, which would be nice. I submitted a feature request to Apple for that.

Wrap-up

So that is that. You can crank out cards really fast on this printer, and they turn out really well. Honestly I think my Epson controlled ink output better, but the HP does pretty awesome and also lets me load cards directly, instead of cutting my own, which is very error-prone because I have the patience of a 3-year-old.

Shout-outs

To my peeps on the 43 folders block, merlin, berko, pookster, keep it real. Real organized.

The fine folks at DIY Planner who slave night and day to make your life easier.

I’d like to give the finger to HP for putting borked software on their downloads site. You guys should try installing your software once and attempting to use it before putting it on the download site. I bet that may solve your problem of putting broken software online. Unless you did test your software and decided that it was good enough in spite of not working.