It is not Okular's bug Your comment Tom was a good suggestion. It seams like qt5 handles printing to file in a different way to qt4 - So in QT5 it writes PDF format by default now. IN Qt4 printer.setOutputFileName("print.ps"); was producing a proper postscript file as in the doc given : http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/printing.html In Qt5 it suddenly fills print.ps with PDF type of content. Qt4 - enum OutputFormat { NativeFormat, PdfFormat, PostScriptFormat } Qt5 - enum OutputFormat { NativeFormat, PdfFormat } My kwrite was not showing it's content properly due to encoding selection being different which made troubleshooting more dificult. sorry for wasting your time guys