"Error while printing" with Save to PDF or Preview

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bpq042

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I am a new OS X user (10.4), having just switched from Windows. I've used Linux a lot too so I am pretty bold about mucking about in system files (but not for fun, only when necessary!).

I don't know how this happened, but somehow my user account got into a state in which I was unable to use "Save to PDF" or Preview from the print dialog. This happened in all applications I tried. My user account is not an administrator. The other non-administrator account on the machine had no problems, nor did the administrator account.

I got some hints from another post on this site, so I looked around for .plist files in ~/Library/Preferences and found the following:

com.apple.print.favorites.plist
com.apple.print.PrintingPrefs.plist
com.apple.print.custompresets.plist

The first two did not appear in the Preferences directories of the other accounts. I deleted those two, leaving the custompresets file.

Problem solved!

I wonder if anyone can explain what happened. I used od to dump the .plist files but didn't see anything that rung a bell. I recently installed Quickbooks Pro 2006, wonder if it broke something.

Where can I look to find out more about the .plist files?
 
Have you examined the files themselves in a text editor or XML editor? There is a PLIST file editor installed as part of XCode. Of course, its pretty academic now since its working anyway, but you could compare the working and non-working versions of the files to see what differences could have caused the failure.
 
Thanks for the tip. I haven't set up Xcode yet but will do so now and look for the plist editor. I dumped the files out and was surprised that they were binary, not text.

Yes, it is academic, but I want to learn my way around the Mac, contribute to the struggle against the evil empire :). I was actually thrilled that I could use my Unix intuition to solve the problem at all, not like solving Registry/DLL problems.
 
I know this is an old post, but it gave me a clue to solve the same problem in Mac OS 10.8.4, TextEdit version 1.8 (301) and Preview version 6.0.1 (765.6). Although the aforementioned files no longer live in ~/Library/Preferences, I looked for recently modified plist files that had to do with printing. I found:
com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter._<IP address redacted>.plist

This is the plist for my Brother network printer. Once I moved it out of this directory, I was able to use the Save as PDF function from TextEdit as I did before, with no error.
 
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