I can't get my Mac to print to my HP OfficeJet Pro 6960. I've been using the HP with the Mac for nearly 18 months, successfully. Although the router was up and working, and the printer connected to it, and the printer the only one listed on the list of printers, it was not waking the printer up. The message on the printer proxy dialog box was that the printer was not connected.
I tried various ways of getting around this: turn printer off and then on again; soft-reboot the router with the reboot button; delete the file to be printed and restart the printing sequence; hard-reboot the router (unplug, wait 30+ seconds, plug in again); various combinations, in various orders of those things. Eventually I decided to try to delete the printer from the Mac's list of printers and add it on again. MISTAKE! It went off the list and I have not been able to "find" the printer from the Mac ever since.
I then downloaded the HP Easy Start app for Mac and, at the "Prepare printer for setup" page, had done all the checks it asked me to, then clicked "Continue", at which point it went to the "Connect" page, gave me the spinning arrow for a while and then the message, "No devices have been found". I clicked the Information button to find the official tips for what else to do and went through all the wireless connection info. I used the "Restore Network Settings" option on the printer itself, used the Wireless Setup Wizard and made sure the printer and router were connected. I even went into the Mac's Network Utility and used the Ping function to ping the printer's IP address, where I got the results,
--- 192.168.1.218 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 7.444/29.608/95.228/24.748 ms
So it's obviously "there" in some senses, but the Mac won't find it to use it.
**HOW** can I get the Mac and the printer to acknowledge one another? I can print off the other Macs in the house, and off my iPhone, so the printer is obviously listening to them via the router. I want to get my MacBook Pro back in touch with it. What must I do?
System: MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) with 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, running OS Mojave 10.14.6