The default error policy for printers on CUPS (which Mac OS X uses, and which most Linux systems also use) is stop-printer.

You can see information about your printers and error policies by looking at the output of the printers.conf file with this terminal command:

If you want to get the actual printer name, though, run

Here is an example of changing the policy of a printer to abort the job instead of stopping the printer:

The other options are retry-current-job, retry-job, and the default stop-printer. You can read up more on those options and other CUPS printers.conf parameters in the official CUPS documentation.

I’ve also created a script that will change all installed printers to have the error policy be abort-job.