This still hasn't been addressed. I second that this is a real pain. I have been a loyal Opera user for years, but that's because it's usually done a great job of keeping up with the competition.
I have been printing to PDF a lot, and have been slow to realize that the problem isn't with printing to PDFs in general, but with Opera itself. If I use Opera's print to PDF, it renders the text as text, but does not include formatting like bold and italics, and replaces some letters with gibberish. Totally unacceptable. Especially since it's using Chromium under the hood.
If I use a third party print to PDF driver, it renders the pages as images, which is also totally unacceptable as they are not searchable or editable. OCR is in no way an acceptable solution to this.
Even Internet Explorer does a far better job of rendering PDFs. This is a critical feature for me, so if Opera cannot enter the 21st century with this functionality, I may finally have to switch browsers. Why has this not been fixed?