It printed fine in April. You unplugged it, closed up the house, and now it is October. You plug it back in and it either does nothing, prints blank pages, or announces that it is offline in a house where everything else is online.
None of that means the printer is broken. Here is what is going on.
The ink dried
Inkjet printers keep tiny nozzles wet by printing a little every so often. Six months of sitting in a hot house, they dry out. Blank pages and streaky pages are almost always this.
Run the printer's cleaning cycle two or three times. It is in the printer's own menu, usually under Maintenance or Tools. It uses ink, and that is fine. If it is still blank after three, the cartridge itself is dry and it is time for new ink, not a new printer.
"Offline" means it lost the WiFi
The printer remembers the network it was on. If the router was replaced, reset, or renamed over the summer, the printer is calling out to a network that no longer exists.
Most printers have a WiFi setup in their menu. Point it at your network, type the password, and it finds its way home. If the printer has no screen, this is a phone call, not a battle.
The computer forgot the printer
Sometimes the printer is fine and the computer is the one that lost track. On the computer, remove the printer and add it again. It sounds drastic. It takes two minutes and it fixes more printer problems than anything else.
The paper tray
Humidity curls paper. A tray of paper that sat all summer will jam. Throw the top inch away and load a fresh stack.
When to give up on it
If the printer is more than eight or nine years old, ink is getting hard to find, and it needs coaxing every time, it may be time. Replacing a printer is a small job, and I will tell you plainly if you are there. Most of the time you are not.
If you would rather not spend an afternoon on it, call. Printers are the single most common thing I fix, and most of them are working again before we hang up.
Call (512) 893-7774. No bots. No runaround. Just real tech help.