Has anyone else been seeing a spike in tickets involving PDFs? Users report that saving a webpage as a PDF or using Print to PDF from Outlook, Word, Excel, and browsers either causes the screen to briefly flash, opens a blank window, or fails completely. It initially looked like an Edge problem, but the behavior seems inconsistent across applications and environments. Some users can save locally but not directly to an SMB share, while others have had success using Chrome or repairing Microsoft 365.
5 Answers
A mixed-browser setup can help narrow this down. Testing the same document in Edge and Chrome quickly shows whether the failure follows the browser or affects the underlying Windows and Office PDF components.
Our issue is more specific to saving directly to an SMB share. Word and Excel can create the PDF successfully when saving locally or to OneDrive, and copying the finished file to the network share afterward works. That points toward a file-share or application interaction rather than PDF generation itself.
For one Outlook Classic user, running an online Microsoft 365 repair restored the ability to print to PDF. It may be worth trying for isolated Office-only cases, even if the broader problem is update-related.
This may be related to the August 2026 .NET Framework cumulative update. Microsoft documented failures in some WPF applications when generating PDF or XPS files that use certain fonts, including Calibri. The issue is resolved for .NET Framework 4.6.2 through 4.7.2 in the September 2026 cumulative update, so installing the applicable update is preferable to using the workaround. Microsoft does provide an AppContext switch to disable the new font protection temporarily, but it reduces security and should only be used when absolutely necessary.
We traced some cases to a recent Edge release. Rolling affected machines back to an earlier browser version restored Print to PDF, although using Chrome has been the easier temporary workaround for many users. Adobe PDF printing was affected for us too, so it does not appear to be limited to Edge's built-in viewer.
That explains the mixed symptoms—we started seeing several different versions of the problem around the same time. Thanks for pointing me toward the update history.