Can't Print to PDF, "Print preview failed"

[svetloslav]

Since last update, I think it happened after I moved all my tabs/tab stacks (500 of them) into a Workspace and made another one to view my email accounts (5 of them) in Vivaldi Mail, but I might be wrong on this conclusion. Yes, I have many extensions also for printing like Circle Reader, Print Edit We and many others and also uBlock and the likes. However with that being said, I have been printing to PDF without a glitch for many years. I don't have an actual printer. I always print to PDF. I have no antivirus software and I have disabled the malware called "windows defender". In attempt to resolve the issue I have disabled all extensions and also I made a test with the "Guest Profile". No matter what I tried, on any given page, I get the print dialogue, it shows "Print preview failed", print button has been grayed out, same as the ability to switch to another printer driver (like MS Print). The only viable option is to press the "Cancel" button. Would appreciate some help on this.

[Pesala]

@svetloslav A known issue in the latest Snapshot. Printing works fine for me in the latest Stable version of Vivaldi.

[svetloslav]

@Pesala I am on the latest stable and I never do betas. Hopefully it gets resolved in following versions. Printing (to PDF) is essential and a lack of it is a deal-breaker for me. Thank for responding and giving some insight on the matter.

[Pesala]

@svetloslav See this post:

@yngve said in Starting to stabilize – Vivaldi Browser snapshot 3381.34:

On my machine, I have not been be able to reproduce a missing preview. OTOH, my elementary steps may not re-enact what others have done closely enough.

I cannot reproduce it either.

[yngve]

@svetloslav @Pesala You may want to have a look at this.

[svetloslav]

@Pesala found other person in the latest update blog with the same problem, who was linking to a bug discussion at chrome development. They had 2 solutions, but the one that worked for me was to run vivaldi with "--disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC" argument. Apparently those are changes Chrome development has made in the never-ending security phobia in the sandboxing code and it is related to unusual locations of executables placement. For the moment resolved with that argument. Consistent with the systematic scare of humanity with the invisible boogyman that is always out there to get them. Of course reverting to a previous version of Vivaldi would also work, but I don't want to loose functionality. But, it is not related to Vivaldi, because ungoogled chromium with an unusual setup is exhibiting the same problem and is fixed the same way.

[svetloslav]

@yngve Thank you very much, yes that worked for me! It is not related to Vivaldi, but to the overly strict sanboxing fundamentals in chrome.

[DoctorG]

Not only in Vivaldi, as i could check over weeks.
That is a nasty issue in many Chromium core related browsers on some Windows systems.

On my Windows 11 the browser Chromium 126 fails, but Vivaldi 6.8 and 6.9 show pint preview.

[tomgoodell]

@svetloslav I'm having the same problem. It also happens in Edge, but not in FireFox, so it is clearly a Chromium issue. I have tried creating a shortcut with the "--disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC" argument appended to vivaldi.exe but it doesn't work. I'm not sure if that's the way to use that argument, if there's another way please let me know.

I'm not sure what triggered this to start, it began sometime in the last week or so.

[DoctorG]

@tomgoodell said in Can't Print to PDF, "Print preview failed":

--disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC

And does not work with Chromium 126 / Windows 11.

[tomgoodell]

Updating my previous reply: With the latest build of Vivaldi (Vivaldi 6.8.3381.57 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision 1d3c8fde9e8cade5abea61e4f3f68df1fa3bcb56) putting "--disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC" (without the quotes) at the end of the Target field in the Shortcut dialog fixed the problem. So the target field of the Shortcut dialog now has this:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe --disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC)

(Replace "username" with the username that appears in your Windows Users folder).

To get it to work I had to delete the shortcut that was already on my taskbar, create a new shortcut to vivaldi.exe on my desktop, modify the Target field as described above, then pin that shortcut to my taskbar. Then it worked.

A few other things I tried that did not work:

• Clean install of Chrome on a computer on which chrome had never been installed—the same problem appeared in Chrome
• Disabling all extensions in Vivaldi

This does not happen on my other Windows 11 computers, so it seems that it must be related to certain configurations of Windows and programs or apps. I haven't taken the time to try and debug that, but if I do and learn anything I'll post it here.

[TheBestPessimist]

@tomgoodell Thank you!

I suffered for this issue as well for a few months before checking the forums, and you solved it for me with the flag:

--disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC

Here's my Vivaldi stats:

Vivaldi	7.0.3495.23 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision	72d89227db29f524d89b1af38163f46e4ed7746e
OS	Windows 11 Version 23H2 (Build 22631.4460)
JavaScript	V8 13.0.245.20
User Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Command Line	"D:\all\all\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC --vivaldi-standalone --flag-switches-begin --allow-insecure-localhost --disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC,HardwareMediaKeyHandling --flag-switches-end --save-page-as-mhtml
Executable Path	D:\all\all\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
Profile Path	D:\all\all\Vivaldi\User Data\Profile 3

[juliendautremont]

I'm on macOS and I had a similar problem where for some pages It didn't work and I had the following message

[5545:259:0319/215947.620131:ERROR:thumbnails_api.cc(280)] Failed to capture https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/19/aws-generative-ai-exec-leaves-to-launch-startup/

that's launching Vivaldi as a regualr App
(without the --disable-features=PrintCompositorLPAC argument)

I then saw that if I first scroll the page I want to copy to the bottom (example with the techcrunch page), then try to capture the page. it works properly.

I guess there are some javascript events linked to scrolling that updates the DOM and interfere with the capture action.