No, that's definitely not it. I subscribe to several newspapers, and the online versions are meant to be printed and saved. Even when I find an offered up PDF version, it does not matter whether I save it or print it to PDF, it is not being recognized as text. When I do run OCR, it comes out very, very poor quality, which is not the case with scanned items and such.
I am currently getting by with copy/pasting to a word document, and then saving to PDF from there, for some reason this method IS working as usual. It does take considerably more time to do, however.
I'm still very confused at what could have changed in the past several days!