Have you ever wanted to know exactly how many print jobs have been done on your Mac? Well, Mac OS X does keep the log of all the print jobs that are done on your machine, and you can see this print history using the workaround explained below. It might be useful for you to know if there has been any printing jobs in your absence or how many failed print attempts there have been. Whatever the reason is, here is how you can see the print history on your Mac using the simplest way available.
In order for this to work, you must have enabled the Web Interface on your machine. To do that, simply follow these steps:
Enabling the Web Interface
Click on Launchpad in your dock and search for and click on “Terminal”. It will launch the Terminal app for you.
When the app launches, type in the following command and press Enter. It tells the Terminal app to enable the web interface on your machine.
It will not bring any output to your screen. When that is done, close the app.
So after enabling the web interface, let’s see how you can use it to view your printing history.
Viewing the Print History
Open any web browser on your Mac, Google Chrome, for example, and enter the following address into the address bar and press Enter. It will open the web interface that you enabled in the above section.
On the page that opens, click on the “Jobs” tab. It is one of the tabs located on the top bar. It lets you see your print jobs.
On the page that follows, you should be able to see a button saying “Show Completed Jobs”. Click on it and it will show you all of the completed jobs on your machine.
Here is where you can see all of the completed print jobs on your machine. There are various columns that provide you with the information for the individual print jobs. It lets you see what printer was used to print the page or pages, size, number of pages that were printed, and completion date and time.
If you have more than 100 jobs, they should be spread over pages to make the navigation easy.
If you wish to see cancelled as well as failed print jobs, simply click on the “Show All Jobs” button and it will list all the jobs that took place on your Mac regardless of their outcome.
If you wish to search for a particular job, you can use the search bar on the top that lets you easily locate the print jobs you are looking for.
Clicking on the printer’s name should let you see the printings that have been done using that particular printer. It’s very useful as it lets you know what printer is the most used in your office.
Conclusion
Having known the print jobs done on your Mac, you should be able to know how much printing work you have and how many cartridges you are going to need the following month.
Mahesh Makvana is a freelance tech writer who’s written thousands of posts about various tech topics on various sites. He specializes in writing about Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android tech posts. He’s been into the field for last eight years and hasn’t spent a single day without tinkering around his devices.
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