Fix paused printers once and for all?

Have you updated the firmware on those printers? Maybe a printer firmware update is needed to work with Monterey. Or maybe you have automatic firmware updates enabled on your printer and perhaps the last firmware update has broken something.

Do any of your printers support an Ethernet or WiFi connection to the network so you bypass the USB for troubleshooting purposes?

Are you using any anti-virus software, cleaning apps, or third party security software that may be interfering with the normal operation of macOS? Try booting into Safe Mode to see if you still have the same printing issues which should disable third party software from automatically running (use a printer which supports AirPrint and is configured with the AirPrint driver).

There is also a chance that these printers are having trouble with the formatting of the document being printed. I know that HP laserprinters in particular have all sorts of driver, firmware, software, and document formatting compatibility issues when printing seemingly simple text & PDF documents, so I can imagine more complex professional print jobs may introduce issues as well. Do the printers contain enough memory to support the professional print jobs you are sending to the printer? If the printers do not have enough memory to process the job, then you may get these conditions. With some printers the print driver may pre-process the document on the computer, while other printers will perform the document processing within the printer itself. Make sure you are using a printer that is compatible & suitable with the type of print jobs you may be sending to it. Not every printer is made for every type of complex document that you want to print.

sjordi wrote:

I'm a software engineer and system engineer since 1980 so I think I'm pretty savvy and know that it's not the usual "Your printer is the faulty one". No it's not.

It's an OS problem that just can't handle printing, a very basic task.

It's just crazy.

Use a cable connection if your issue is wireless...

You can manage CUPs from your browser if you have issues with the software.

click the link or copy & paste into your browser to interact w/ CUPS management—

http://localhost:631 see the admin

if you have no interface, from the terminal.app copy & paste:

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

Administration>Jobs—if you have jobs backed up or stalled remove them from the queue and try again.

Wow, I'm impressed! I wish more people would go to such lengths to test and write up the report in such a nice easy to read & understand format along with all the relevant details. Good job.

Did you print from the Windows laptop to one of your printers at this location with your Macs?

Did you associate your AppleID to any of these clean installs or did you just create a new local macOS user account with no association to an AppleID? You can see I'm really grasping at straws for you.

Did you try printing from TextEdit printing just a simple text document (I would not even save the document when test printing)?

From everything you mention, it suggests something with a macOS update although I haven't seen any posts on these forums about an issue as @ku4hx mentioned. The only thing I can think of to confirm is to test from macOS 10.14 Mojave (or maybe 10.13 High Sierra) which should not have any recent security updates which macOS 10.15+ all may share.

You could also try to see if you can download an earlier version of one of the 10.15+ versions of macOS with an earlier point release which worked before you noticed the problem. I'm not sure if it is possible to download an earlier point release, but you can get a list of downloadable macOS 10.15+ installers to see if they offer an earlier point release. You will need to use the command line "softwareupdate" utility to get a list of available macOS installers and if an earlier point release exists, then you can try downloading it using the command line (just make sure to delete any later point release versions located anyware on the Mac unless stored in an archive file). This option I believe is only available starting with macOS 10.15 Catalina. You will need to create a bootable macOS USB installer to use a point release installer.

List available macOS installers:

softwareupate  -list-full-installers

Download an installer from the list (pick a particular version from the list output by the previous command), for example (I added the "-d" option for "download only"):

softwareupdate  -d  -fetch-full-installer  -full-installer-version  11.5.2

See this link for details:

https://macreports.com/how-to-download-macos-installers-using-terminal/

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

If you can confirm an earlier point release works fine with a clean install, then it most likely means one of three things. You found some really obscure bug since I have not seen any other reports, or there is something with document's formatting that is triggering an issue, or your Mac has some sort of hardware issue that is causing the problem with a later macOS update. An obscure macOS bug seems the most likely out of three unlikely choices. Just make sure no external devices are connected when testing the print jobs.

This may be something you need to escalate to an Apple engineer especially since you've tested with clean installs on several Macs and printing to several printers using USB & Ethernet. However, I can see this may be something that may never get solved unless the next macOS update magically fixes it since an Apple engineer usually needs to be able to reproduce the problem in order to fix it or gather the necessary information from the macOS logs.

From our perspective, if it ever existed, Apple has fixed it. We have four printers and none have the issue you're having. Since 2015 for our perspective.

I'm an Apple user since 1978 with a brand spanking new Apple ][. We all have our credentials.

macOS 12.4 Monterey was recently released so see if that update changed anything.

sjordi wrote:

But I noticed something now that my laser printer is connected via Ethernet. It stops too but doesn't actually switch to pause mode. Only that eventually the pages end up printed, but it could take more than an hour.

I printed a 10-page PDF the other day, it stopped printing after page 4. Went jogging for an hour. Came back, still those 4 pages. Took my shower and then, all pages were printed...

During the entire process, the queue is always shown as empty, no matter what printer I use.

This would normally tell me it is the formatting of the documents causing the problem. If the macOS print queue is empty it should mean the document was sent to the printer and the printer is attempting to process the document. Older printers, and printers with very little memory can easily take a long time to process some documents.

If we switched to her former Macbook Pro, they both print fine. The out of the box fresh Macbook Air 2020 doesn't.

It's really crazy.

I've tried on other networks, office Wifi, no Wifi at all, etc... that doesn't change anything.

However, this tells us it is a macOS issue, so it is possible that the recent macOS patches have somehow modified the information being sent to the printer making these printers have to work harder to print the document (if at all). Since it happens with different printers & drivers, it may be something more generalized such as the basic printing system unrelated to any specific driver.

Try printing a file from the command line. Maybe it will bypass some of the higher level macOS features which may be causing a problem. There are a couple of different ways to do this. While I have printed from the command line before (Linux, but the process is similar), I haven't done so in a long time. I did discover this option in a quick search:

List all printers:

lpstat  -p

Choose a printer name from the list and use the following command as a template making sure to replace "<printer-name>" with the actual name of a printer from the previous command and where is says "<path-to-document>/document.pdf", just drag & drop the file onto the open Terminal window from the Finder to auto-fill the correct path to the document (don't type "<path-to-document>/document.pdf"):

lp  -d  <printer-name>   <path-to-document>/document.pdf

So, if the name of a printer is "Canon1234" and the document is stored in your Documents folder as "Test-doc.txt", then the command would be something like this:

lp  -d  Canon1234   /Users/hwtech/Documents/Test-doc.txt

There is also an "lpr" command:

lpr  -P  <printer-name>  <path-to-document>/document.pdf  

Which using the same info as before it would become:

lpr  -P  Canon1234   /Users/hwtech/Documents/Test-doc.txt

Note: It is important to make sure to retain the upper case or lower case characters on the command options indicated by the hyphen/dash character. The "-P" is an upper case "P". The same applies to the printer name as well.