Machine wide settings?

PDFCreator Beta
1

Is it possible to have all settings in the machine registry hive instead of the user hive?
Ideally a user can’t have own settings if machine settings are existent.
We use version 1.9.4 and there it’s sadly not possible.

2

Maybe I should clarify this.
We want to give our users a set of PDFCreator printers with specific assigned profiles.
unfortunately:

  1. there is no option to import a settings file automated via commandline
  2. when these settings are imported via registry the printers are not created (which in my experience is nothing else than importing it via the GUI - same behaviour).

As a result we import the settings via registry and then create the printers via printerhelper.exe /addprinter xxxx.

The downside of this is:

if not all users get the same printers there are differences in their user registry settings:

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\PDFCreator.net\Settings\ApplicationSettings\PrinterMappings: Value “numClasses” (printer count)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\PDFCreator.net\Settings\ApplicationSettings\PrinterMappings\0 …1 …2 …: the printers with their assigned profile

But since the printers themselves are machine settings, why aren’t the settings saved in the registry machine hive, too?

Moreover, if printerhelper.exe could create a printer and assign a profile to it - that would really be a blast!

3

Hi,

Please let me explain the PDFCreator perspective on the printers and printer mappings:

I agree with you, that printers are a matter of the machine, so they are created machine wide. For PDFCreator, the profiles are user-specific though. And each user may have different profiles. This is why the printer mappings are handled in the user hive.

So the printers are available to all users, it is more a question of the profiles to map.

This is where the first part of your question kicks in: Would it be possible to give the user a predefined set of settings?

Right now, you can place settings in HKU\.DEFAULT and if no user settings are present, the defaults will be loaded from there. Our goal is to be able to either give the user a fixed set of settings or (at choice of the admin) a set of profiles and/or application settings that are applied to his profile and that he will not be able to change. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for? This is neither done nor started right now, but we have a ticket for this in our tracker.

This probably is not a real answer for you right now, but it shows where we stand.

4

Yes, this would help us! We will look into this!

Thanks for the support!