How do you print from an iPad?!

Ok, I'm not new to the iPad, but now that for various reasons I have one at home, I realized I never did it before.

So: how do you print? On a network printer. In a LAN.

If you don't have one of several specific HP printers - You will need a Mac and a piece of software called Printopia.

There is also a DIY proceedure to get the same function as Printopia.

Printopia, advertises your mac's printers to the iPad.

Apple needs to bake AirPrint into the airport and time capsules.

Not likely to happen, unless the Airport hands it off to a computer somewhere to process. The Airport would have to run enough of the OS X (or some other OS) code to also run print drivers. And then do a translation similar to what Printopia does to take the content from the iPad.

Over the years, printer manufacturers removed more and more logic from the printer hardware and added it to the drivers. The downside is that even if Apple added support to print off the iPad to some older standard, it still wouldn't print to many printers out there.

http://netputing.com/airprintactivator/

Tried this first, and failed to achieve ink on paper. YMMV.

Ok, so no direct IP printing for me.
Anything i can install on a windows server (or wkstation) print server to enable access to a printer shared from there, maybe?

Thank you guys.

http://jaxov.com/2010/11/how-to-enable-airprint-service-on-windows/ is out there for Windows, but reports say this stopped working with iOS 5 and iTunes 10.5, likely due to the major iTunes rewrite.

Apple was working on official support for this, and then abandoned it for some reason. Most of these hacks try and extend what Apple shipped as a developer beta. As Glenn said, YMMV with these solutions.