Why do I only get dots in my popup?

PaperCut likes to allow it’s users to make decisions as quickly as possible. One of these decisions is the Shared Account Selection Popup.

In many cases the Account Selection decision can be made without waiting for the spool file to finish sending to the server or even finish rendering on the client machine. So as soon as we see a new job, we grab the information from the printing system that’s available and display it to user.

You might see something like this:

This notification is available even though Adobe Reader is still rendering the job:

At this point, I could select the Shared Account of my choosing and click Print. However if I need further information, such as the number of pages or the cost, just to make sure I’m not wasting paper, it shows up a moment later:

These two popups are known as “Pre-Notification” and “Post Analysis”. In many cases you may not notice the Pre-Notification simply because modern networks, servers and client machines are fast and print jobs are small bits of data, but it is still there!

If you’re printing large documents, complex documents or even large complex documents, this explains what is going on.

Can I turn off the Pre-Notification?

While we think this is a great feature we understand that there are times where it’s advantageous to turn it off. This can be done in the PaperCut Print Provider’s “print-provider.conf” on Windows.

1. Open the [app-path]\providers\print\win\print-provider.conf
2. Locate PreNotifications=on
3. Change to PreNotifications=off
4. Restart the PaperCut Print Provider server service
5. Test

Can I select my account without the Popup?

To reduce the need for running the PaperCut User Client, from PaperCut MF v19.0, with a compatible MFD (see compatibility requirements here), you can submit print jobs that require account selection, and complete that selection directly at the MFD. For more information see Assigning accounts to print jobs at the MFD.