So i loaded hp smart and it shows the printer "printer status unknown" with a perpetually spinning blue circle. i went with "other" software and it loaded a window within the program saying something about not being compatible with mobile.
I read thread after thread and blog post after blog post about how to fix the issue, i'm not really tech savvy so i can't even really recall what i did, but i've followed step by step directions that had me opening up a bunch of settings and properties windows and tooling around with stuff, i downloaded the printers drivers from the HP website after removing them, and when prompted to connect my USB cable i did, then it couldnt connect to my wifi, so i went with connect w/ usb cable, and after that i got some error message within the driver setup program telling me to download some other software or use hp smart.
I purchased a usb printer cable to connect my printer to my computer, thinking that for sure that would work. i can't do anything on that side of things. i had connected it to my wifi network, but after looking it up, figured that it likely says offline because i have spectrum community wifi, which is problematic for browserless devices. I initially used the HP smart program to setup the printer and discovered that it was showing the printer as offline.