A few days ago, an update to HP printer drivers was released by Apple. Thinking nothing of it, I went right ahead and downloaded it.
Unfortunately this update totally broke printing on my Mac running OS X Lion. Not only that, but I could not even print to PDF.
Apple’s printer and scanner support website suggests these are third-party drivers, but I would have hoped Apple would test them thoroughly before shipping them via Software Update. I’m seriously disappointed that something so fundamental should break this way; after all, it’s why I ditched Windows for Linux, and then ditched Linux for Mac.
Fortunately, it turns out there is a fix for broken HP printer drivers on Lion, via the Apple Support Communities:
sudo rm /Library/Printers/hp/PDEs/hpPostScriptPDE.plugin
Crude, brutal, but it works.