This is on openSuse tumbleweed with a Brother HL-2040 and the Brother driver and wrapper-driver, problem as stated. Printed for years with no problems until last week. Where and how should I look to tackle this?

The first question to ask is: What changed in the last week?
Have you reviewed the print settings in Okular? Compared them to the settings in Firefox and/or LibreOffice?

Well, this is tumbleweed, literally hundreds of system / program files change each week, so this is quite impossible for me to answer. All the more so as I don't print very often and the change responsible might be considerably older.

I checked the settings in okular and it can't do a print preview, the translated error message is something like "couldn't load the print-preview component". Any ideas what that "component" would be called in English?

Have you checked the log files in /var/log/cups, particularly the error.log files?

They might provide some hints.

it might also be the PDF you are trying to print

try a different PDF in Ockular and see if that prints

That is a hard one. There are hundreds of lines with messages for just one print-job, some seemingly normal, some maybe relevant errors. I can't read this, for me it is a huge heap of gibberish. So I renamed error.log to get at least the newest messages -- and cups appended the new messages to the renamed file *scratch-head*.

Be that as it may. I'll attach the log below. Relevant for my last attempt at printing are the time-stamps of 03/Mar/2020:19:08:56 +0100 and later. <edit> had to clip the file to that span of time, too large </edit>. Hope you can read something out of that.

Thanks for your efforts.

Attached Files

error_log.txt (74.3 KB, 27 views)

Bulls eye. It seems to be the file. Darn. Any suggestions for another program to print that file?

Chromium based browsers are good at opening pdf's, so if you have chromium or brave or vivaldi (etc) I'd try one of those.

then use LibreOffice - Draw to open the PDF
and print from that

Both your suggestions worked (Chromium much faster ). Thank you.

I'll mark this thread as solved -- but I would still like to know WHY this file kills printing only in okular. So please any further visitor to this thread do have a look at that error log appended in post #6 and enlighten me -- much appreciated .