I've done a bit of research on the Internet, and it looks like I'm at a dead end.
My goal is to minimize cost, and be able to send and print documents automatically (approximately 10 or 20 pages per day) to a laser printer in a remote office.
The preliminary method is to use: iOS 5.1.1 (jailbroken) with 3G connection, HP (or other brands) printer with AirPrint, iCloud Documents and maybe write some launchd scripts to monitor any new documents in iCloud. Maybe with other software. I am not sure yet.
By using the cloud, I can upload new docs to the cloud anywhere in my city, and the iOS will be able to see them within a reasonable amount of time, then print it.
But it seems this combo is not workable.
Anyone got any advice on how to make this set up work, or propose other alternatives? Currently I have a 3GS with 3G connectivity spare. Need to buy a new printer though.
Best Answer
AirPrint isn't likely to help you here. It's a basically a local network only technology, because of how it functions, it's very unlikely that you could get it working over an iOS device's 3G connection. The only way I could see it working is with a VPN, but I'm not aware of any solutions that can pipe AirPrint over a VPN.
What I would suggest (in rough form) is using email or Dropbox to send documents to be printed remotely. Pretty much any document you can access on iOS can be sent via email or Dropbox.
The basic idea is a computer running in your office that monitors an email address and/or a Dropbox folder, and automatically prints email attachments or files in the Dropbox folder. How you go about this depends on what software you're running on that computer, but on a Mac, you could print email attachments using Mail.app's rules filtering and some AppleScript, or files in Dropbox using a Folder Action.