LibreOffice Writer 4.3.5.2 No default printer found message and can't print. Windows 8.1

After the past couple of upgrades of LibreOffice I now am unable to directly print. I have a USB attached Samsung printer that is marked by Windows as default, but while listed in the print dialog box doesn’t come up as default in LibreOffice Writer. I can print to the same printer by saving the .odt file as a .pdf and printing from Acrobat, so the printer is fine. At first the problem seemed to be older .odt files, but now is present for every file including new ones. I am running Windows 8.1 in US English. Thanks for the help.

Note that Printer Settings is grayed and displays the “No default printer found” message. The print window itself shows page dimensions of 0.00 and 0.00 regardless of which printer is selected from that dialog box. When this happens, nothing prints.

Smells a bit like a user profile corruption. Cf. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/UserProfile

You will have to retrieve your templates and your macros (if any) by copying the respective profile subfolders from the backup back into the new profile.

Editing with regard to comments:

On a Win 8 (or 7 or 8.1) system with a V4 version of LibO installed you will find a folder ‘user’ in the path ‘%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4’ . This folder including all its subfolders and contained files we call the LibreOffice-4-userprofile. By renaming it to ‘user.bak’, eg. you cause LibreOffice on the next start to create a new default user profile. You may retrieve some of your former settings and amendments by copying the respective contents from the ‘user.bak’ folder to the respective place in the new ‘user’ folder. This is what I described in short as “retrieve from the backup”. The ‘user’ folder will also contain a folder named ‘backup’ which is ment to host backup copies in the former state of documents that were edited (if the referring option is set). This is a completely different thing, but, of course, you may also retrive such backup files later "from the backup ‘user.bak’ ".

Please be careful and read once more very thoroughly and completely the instructions and advices here.

If I close everything in LibreOffice and create a new .odt from scratch, without a template, it behaves just fine. If I open an old .odt that has the problem then try and create a new document from within writer, the new document also has the problem. Once it has the problem it doesn’t seem to ever fix itself. Dropping old text via paste special and not preserving formatting can create a working new file, but it doesn’t always seem to continue to work. Very strange behavior.

Where is the user profile stored? I don’t see a relevant folder within my Windows profile, like under AppData, Local. Thanks for the help.

Okay…I found the profile under AppData, Roaming, but backup is empty and it is not at all obvious what would need to be fixed. Thanks again.

I followed the instructions and now have a new user profile. Unfortunately, that didn’t have any impact at all on the behavior of the files. Newly created ones behave correctly while older files have the “no default printer found” error. Both can be open at the same time and each instance is different. Opening a newer file after opening an older (failed) file now exhibits the “bad” behavior. Closing everything out and reopening the newer file works correctly. Attribute of older .odt file?

This doesn’t sound well. Maybe I wont’t find a solution without sitting at the keyboard of your system, and I might even find none if I am there. Just another question. Did you change your system (in specific its printing facilities) fundamentally since the old documents and their templates were created?

My next attempt: Intalling a LibreOfficePortable from the “.paf.exe” into a temporary folder. If I then get the same problem I would judge the system’s registry corrupted in a general way. The OS may offer different paths for applications to access printer settings and the one LibO tries to use may be broken.
Otherwise (LibOPort working well) I would completely uninstall LibO, close the system down, start it anew, and reinstall LibO.

I would expect a registry issue to be more consistent across .odt documents, not to vary with particular ones. The ones with the issue were created when I was using my home desktop and printing to a network printer (CUPS on Linux). The new ones are created on my laptop and print to a directly USB attached printer. I have updated LibO recently, twice, once before I left and again on the road. The problem is the same for both updates.

An update might not clean-up as rigidly as a “uninstall/down/startup/install-procedure”.

I’m afraid you won’t find one actually knowing exactly your problem, and also knowing the one definitive rescue. You might have to experiment additionally. I at least don’t know a setting or whatever to that effect, and I think there shouldn’t be one. Documents must be exchangeable after all. Concluding from this there must be a corrupted config …

You may, of course, prefer your own conclusions.

You may attach one of the afflicted files (without any confidential content, of course) for helping us help testing. I will upvote your question to provide enough “karma” for the job.