Spoiler to the story is in the title.
I’m not going to tell a three-page story full of angst, drama, and existential musings, when my solution was “I changed the document scaling and it printed.”
I am going to rant a bit about what happened before I found that solution.
The beginning of the story
More formally, the full name on the printer is “HP LaserJet Pro 200 color M251nw”. I bought this one used several years ago. The previous owner did not like how much the toner cost.
I was printing out a multipage document. I saw error code 79, firmware error. This sounded bad. The printer said to turn it off, turn it back on, try to reprint the document. I did. I still got error 79.
Multiple websites later, most of them recommended power cycling and trying to print again. I had already tried that.
The red herring: A surge suppressor???
At least one website said to disconnect it from any surge suppressor and plug it directly into the wall outlet. I was dubious, thinking that 1) I cannot see any way there would be enough line drop, current limitations, change to voltage waveform, change to line characteristics, or anything else I could think of which a surge suppressor would create which would prevent a previously functioning laser printer from continuing to function, and 2) if for some reason the circuitry is so tender and so balanced on knife’s edge that a surge suppressor does prevent it from functioning, and it got through HP’s design, design review, and QA teams like that and was still released, I would doubt all HP products forever after.
No, the surge suppressor had nothing to do with it. I have no reason to doubt HP’s products. I have no idea why that website said a surge suppressor could the cause of the firmware error.
What no one suggested (no one I saw, anyway)
After more troubleshooting, none of which I saw recommended on any of the sites I looked at, I narrowed the problems down to one page. It was one page, out of dozens, which caused the error 79 to show up when I tried to print it.
It was a PDF page, original scale 8.5″ x 11″. The page was a scan of an older document printed before laser printers existed. I had set my PDF reader to automatically scale to page margins or printer margins or something like that. It came up with a scale percentage around 99%. I changed to a custom scale, and reduced it to 97%. Then it printed fine. No errors, no problems.
I fixed the error, in that document, on my printer, by changing the document scaling. I have no idea if that will work for anyone else.