I'm also affected by this bug. Using hplip-3.16.8+repack0-2 I'm trying to print a html page from Google Chrome with an o-umlaut in the title.
I get the following in /var/log/cups/error_log: D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] Traceback (most recent call last): D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] File \"/usr/lib/cups/filter/hpps\", line 203, in <module> D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] os.write(output_fd, to_bytes_utf8(\'@PJL SET JOBNAME=\"%s\"\\x0a\' % title)) D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] File \"/usr/share/hplip/base/sixext.py\", line 109, in to_bytes_utf8 D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] return s.encode(\"utf-8\") D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] UnicodeEncodeError: \'utf-8\' codec can\'t encode character \'\\udcc3\' in position 30: surrogates not allowed D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] PID 29617 (/usr/lib/cups/filter/hpps) stopped with status 1. D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug" to find out more. D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] Before copy_setup - %%Page: 1 1 D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] Before page loop - %%Page: 1 1 D [09/Sep/2016:10:14:45 +0200] [Job 312] Copying page 1... If I remove the o-umlaut in the title t page prints without problems. The workaround mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/1498366 solves this for me. Peje