Printing website crashes most printers

Question

Well, this one of the strangest behaviors I've ever had. Trying to print a site of our newly created webpage crashes many printers on many different ways.

The errors

Following thinks happen depending on what page we are trying to print:

• random characters ",,-a!!!ASdŸu" appear on the printers display. (reboot needed)
• printer says: "Err 42 Turn Off then On" / "Err 49". (reboot needed)
• printer says: "Document is printing" (we waited an hour, he lies.) (reboot needed)
• printer says: "Document is corrupt" ( automatically reboots )
• print driver says: remote host did not accept data file (32).
• print driver hangs up at 74%, 97% or 99%.
• printer does absolutely nothing.

The problem seems only to appear on the OSX platform, but we've only got one Windows machine so we are not sure.

We don't generate any special PDF's or something we actually just press CMD+P to print.

Also we could not record that it depends on the browser we had the same issue on:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

 What we already tried:

To find out which part of the website the printer doesn't like, we took out every single piece of the layout step by step and tried to print. The conclusion: We still have no damn clue.

Removing everything from the content (keeping the layout, header, footer, etc.) just having one paragraph as content work's everywhere. Just replacing the paragraph with an h1 element bring one of the above listed errors.

• We tried to remove all javascript, still didn't work.
• We tried to remove the web fonts didn't work.

 What hardware we tested:

Printers we tested where we could not print without crashing them:

• HP LaserJet P2055dn
• HP LaserJet color 500 M551
• Samsumg SCX 3405F
• HP Color Laserjet CM1415fnw

Printers that had no problem:

• HP OfficeJet X476dw
• Xerox Docuprint N2125

Does anybody ever had a similar issues? Does someone have an idea what we could do to solve this problem?

edit:

The Website: http://golfimport.ch/de/

Because images say more than words, my favourite error message:

Answer 1

The error indicates that there is something wrong with the data sent to the printer. I can think of two sources:

1. The printer driver got damaged and sends a broken init sequence to the printer.
2. The file contains some data which really confuses the printer

Since you can print from other applications but a PDF of the web site breaks the printer, my guess is that there is an image in the page which contains a virus or is broken in some other way. The next culprit could be the font that you're using.

The rationale here is that operating systems have seen a couple of security related updates regarding image libraries in the past few years since people have started to create image files which contain carefully designed byte sequences which trigger bugs in the image libraries of the operating systems to gain access to the computer that displays them.

The same attack is possible with fonts.

Most operating systems are hardened against this kind of attack but printers are another matter. They rarely get firmware upgrades, so when they're vulnerable, they usually stay that way.

PDF is interesting here since it can embed some kinds of images and fonts in binary. So even if your OS isn't affected, the broken data will be sent to the poor printer and break it.

Try to replace all images (also all image sprites and the like pulled in via CSS). If that doesn't help, look at the fonts which are being used.

Also check for a virus.