My elderly neighbor who is an accomplished engineer and has been using Linux for ages recently upgraded his distro. I think he is using Ubuntu or Fedora. Now whenever he prints pages every line of text has a line through it.
He has been able to verify that it is not his printer. He has tried a Live CD as well and is having the same issue. When he goes back to the old version things print fine.
He surmises it is some sort of diagnostic feature in CUPS or some other part of the printing subsystem that is improperly turned on by default.
Has anyone seen this before? I am not a Linux expert, but I would like to help him out.
I have mostly avoided printers whenever possible, but I did find an old thread from 2010 that discusses a similar issue: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=44034
While that is not a huge help for you, it may corroborate the assumption that it’s a software issue.
My generic knowledge is that printer drivers have always been somewhat interchangeable. You may be able to try generic drivers at random to see if that helps. Dunno.