Not All Error Messages Are Informative
Posted by Pete McBreen 13 Aug 2010 at 18:17
I ran across a really annoying error message from Adobe Acrobat in a corporate setting this week. It was refusing to print anything and the explanation message it gave was
there were no pages selected to print
Nothing much out there on the net was helpful in fixing this, but eventually I discovered that the print queue I was using had been deleted from the print server. So technically there were no pages selected to print because Acrobat could not find the printer so did not know what it was supposed to be printing on.
It would have been much easier and faster to resolve this issue if the developers had considered this as a possible failure mode and rather than put out the not very descriptive “no pages selected to print” they had reported the fact that Acrobat could not contact the printer because it no longer existed on the target print server.
So if I ever see this again I’m going to confirm that the printer queue still exists before trying anything else. Fix in the end was trivial, add the printer again under its new name and delete the old printer.