Printing has stopped working for a printer

opensuse 12.2
Kyocera cs-3050 printer

I saw this first with LibreOffice. A print job is sent to the printer (via a remote CUPS server), and nothing is printed despite all the celebration about successfully submitting the job. Now the non-printing feature has spread to other programs, Firefox and Thunderbird so far.

I discovered that, for some unknown reason, that LibreOfiice has decided that this particular printer (Kyocera CS-3050) should use a default language of PDF instead of Postscript. WTF!

I suspect the same thing is happening with the other apps as well.I can open the “Properties” for the printer in LibreOffice and change the output language; I cannot do the same for other apps, there is no Properties option.

I can print to other printers with no problem, but those printers are “personal” ones, not meant for general use.

How do I convince the printing system to use a sensible page language for output by default?

For libreoffice, persistent changes can be made via the spadmin utility (run with root privileges) to set PDF or postscript printing

xdg-su -c /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/spadmin

Okay, that worked for LibreOffice. Now to get all of the other apps printing again…

I had printing stop for me too suddenly. I’m using an HP Laserjet P1006, but with the foo2xqx driver from:

foo2xqx: a linux printer driver for XQX stream protocol

Installed using the instructions provided there. I’ve been using this driver for a few years now and it has always worked, and in fact was working, until something changed recently. Now CUPS just shows jobs as completed, but they haven’t actually printed out. Changing language for printer in LibreOffice doesn’t help, but then this isn’t a postscript printer, so maybe that wouldn’t work anyway?

if you are using lo from LibreOffice Productivity Suite Download, try,

    xdg-su -c /opt/libreofficeX.X/program/spadmin 

where ‘X.X’ represents the version and sub-version numbers

I think there was a recent update to udev which must have messed up my working configuration. I tried reinstalling the foo2xqx driver, and when it came to the step of doing:

make install-hotplug

It failed, saying that udev had taken over printer detection, and it suggested trying again after removing udev rules by doing:

rm -f /lib/udev/rules.d/*-printers.rules

This worked, and now the printer is functioning again for everything. I have no idea if this is related to the original poster’s problem, and I apologize if it isn’t and for potentially mucking up the thread.