Preview Save As PDF error message “error while printing” after Catalina

Thank you Seth486 - your suggestion worked - I only have 2 printers in my dialogue box, a Canon and an Epson - but only the Canon is "on" and in regular use, so I selected the Epson which was not even turned "on" and then did the Save As PDF and it worked. Which lead to me think maybe even though I'm not printing, that somehow my Canon printer, (which works just fine as a printer), maybe the printer's driver is causing some issue - so, I deleted this printer and added it back in (there were 2 options for this printer - a Canon series or Canon Bonjour - I selected the Bonjour driver option and attempted to do what I initially had issues with - select a series of images that I wanted to Save As PDF and proceeded as I normally would and it worked just fine - odd, but will see if this continues to work.

In response to jblanchard1 - I am not sure what you meant by "vendor" driver? I only see access to printer drivers for printers that my iMac has access to, which are the 2 printers I own - a Canon and an Epson (currently my Canon is the default in my dialogue box). Seth486 suggested choosing another printer than the one currently in the dialogue box, and thankfully my Epson printer which is not turned on, but visible in dialogue box, was selectable, then I proceeded to Save As PDF and it worked. Your Safari suggestion works for individual images being opened and saved as PDF, but I didn't see a way to conveniently combine a series of images this way. But I appreciate your suggestion.

no -- that is what is odd, when I followed Seth486's suggestion to select another printer, and I selected the turned off Epson and that worked, but that printers is OLD and is not an AirPrint printer. And when I deleted my Canon and added it back, I saw 2 options - Canon MG7700 Series and Canon MG7700 Bonjour... so I tried the Bonjour this time and as you said, in Sys Prefs under "kind" for the printer it does say AirPrint. My guess is the other driver option is not AirPrint and was causing the issue, but this issue is new - I had no issues before Catalina with either printer or Preview Save As PDF. Or maybe just deleting the printer and adding it back got rid of the bug causing the issue - I really don't know. Anyway, it seems fixed for now.

I am working on my iMac, in Catalina 10.15.1 -- the printer driver in Sys Prefs does say "Kind: Canon model# Series-AirPrint" -- how do I add the printer via AirPrint? I added the printer in Sys Prefs>Printers & Scanners> add or delete printer from the options the iMac sees that are available to it. Not sure I'm understanding how to add it as an AirPrint printer, I think it's just whatever printers that the iMac and Catalina see available - I don't think I manually downloaded this printer's driver to my iMac if that is what you meant?

If being an AirPrint printer is the fix, my first printer, the Canon, which was giving me issues, is an AirPrint printer - so I'm not sure how related these issues are, but I appreciate your help either way and I will keep it in mind if the issue rears its ugly head again - I will say after the 10.15.1 update initially this issue was resolved, then within minutes of it working, it stopped working without any change on my part - so this issue could come back.