Tech Tip: Preventing update notifications when printing to PDFCreator on Windows
PRODUCT: 4D | VERSION: 13.3 | PLATFORM: Win
Published On: November 5, 2013
When printing to PDF docuemnts from Windows using PDFCreator, the PDFCreator program may periodically notify you of an update:
This check will prevent the print job from completing until the dialog is clicked upon, and since the dialog is outside the ocntext of 4D it may not be immediately obvious. Even worse, this message can be displayed on a Server which may be unattended.
There is a registry key that controls this behavior. The following registry skips can be used for disabling the update check entirely:
On 32 bit machines:
| Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\PDFCreator\Program] "UpdateInterval"="0" |
On 64 bit machines:
| Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\PDFCreator\Program] "UpdateInterval"="0" |
Save the text above (matching your system architecture) in a file with a reg extesnion (for example, pdfupdate.reg) and run it to integrate the change into your registry.
This option can also be configured directly within the PDFCreator application:
- choosing Printer menu > Options > General > General Settings 2.
- Use the drop menu below "Update interval" to select the frequency:
- Never
- Daily
- Monthly
- Weekly
- ClicK on Save to validate.
- Note that:
- Selecting "Never" will disable the update checker.
- Press the "Check Now" button to manually check for new updates.
Commented by Tim Nevels on August 20, 2016 at 2:14 PM
This doesn't always work because you need elevated privileges to set values in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in many cases.
The fix is to use HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\PDFCreator\Program. This always works for the current user without the need for elevated privileges. No need to check for 64bit machines with this key because it is based on the user.