Canon printer stuck on “Creating print data” Canon 5300 Series Printer

This post describes what it means when a Canon printer gets stuck on “Creating print data” and what you can do to fix it.

What does Creating Print Data actually mean?

There are a couple of reasons creating print data may appear. It isn’t a very helpful message in terms of working out whats going wrong.

Some users have reported that this may occur when one of the ink cartridges are low.

However the main reason that this may occur is if the computer is failing to prepare the data to send to the printer. This may mean that the computer is having issues with the print driver and communicating with the printer.

What we can do to fix it

As suggested above, if your printer is saying it is out of ink, replacing the ink may quickly fix the issue. Once you have installed the new ink cartridge printing should continue. If it doesn’t then turning the printer off and back on should resolve the issue.

If this doesn’t resolve it then it is recommended to reinstall the printer driver. First you will need to go into “Printers and Scanners” and remove the printer.

When this has been completed you will want to press the “Add printer or scanner” and find the printer.

At this point the printer should be added to the control panel. This should now let you print your files as this error should be gone.

If the page shows “Driver not available” then you will need to find a driver from the canon website and install it.

For my printer, the MG5300 series printer, the primary canon website did not have the drivers available. However I did find them on the Canon Asia website, available here. I cannot promise this driver is free from malware however it does seem to be after using it. For the binary for the MG5300 printer driver the hashes are:

md5 ab1454caf3e954f4807d5fd30f260af7 *mp68-win-mg5300-1_01-ea24.exe
sha1 f9098fa6c85f9ff4ec0e077b69bfeef9388a1555 *mp68-win-mg5300-1_01-ea24.exe
sha512 e57c356f9ed10926c78377286afe5e6a38a7892f5612707ee91337bb104a71cf8c14087731e6412b95651a8e5815b9b1da2781d83b4d0d69abdfc0d2755fc10c *mp68-win-mg5300-1_01-ea24.exe

Once this had been installed my printer was working as expected.

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