Printing from Win32 application - new after installing 22h2 update

Question

After installing 22h2 update we get this new and "annoying" dialog box in some programs. Annoying since this dialog box always picks up the default printer (we have many), so that you lose the entries made earlier. This dialog box only appears on certain programs, e.g. indesign. Does not come up in Office programs, Photoshop etc. Before 22H2 we did not get this dialog box. We see this is the dialog box that comes up when you press "shift+ctrl+p" In, for example, Indesign, we press "ctrl+p", then "setup", then this new dialog box appears.  When we pressed "setup" before 22H2, one went straight to the Printer driver's setup without going through this  "Printing from Win32 application" dialog box.

How can we avoid this dialog box?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Sumit,

Sorry to be hijacking the thread here. Thank you for pointing that out, as I had totally missed it. As stated by Espen Johansen, this has to be done every time we want to print. We usually do color proofs first, then the actual print run, on all the machines. It appears that this dialog shows up for every printer from InDesign now, if I choose Setup, just as Espen Johansen mentioned. I, too, would like the option to get rid of this dialog box as the default behavior, so I can more easily choose the options relevant to the particular printer.

I apologize to both of you for inserting myself in this discussion. I hope that I didn't prevent or hinder your progress in any way.

Thank you.

Hi,

I'm Ramesh here. Since you replied to my post, I assume your last message was directed to me. Anyway, you may want to check out a registry method I found that brings back the legacy print dialog in Windows 11 22H2. It works only for classic/win32 apps.

I hope you and Espen Johansen will find it helpful.

Answer 2

While I haven't found a way how to restore the Print dialog using Win32 API directly, apparently I have found a source of the problem, why the simple editing of the Registry didn't return the old dialog as before.

Currently I use the last available system update of the Windows 11 22H2, 22621.2428 and have the classic (legacy) dialog whenever I need. The source of the problem is in wrong type of Registry value.

In the freshly installed Windows 11 22H2, the key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Print\UnifiedPrintDialog

has the value PreferLegacyPrintDialog with type REG_NONE instead of REG_DWORD, and OS cannot read it properly despite the fact that it's the predefined value. You can modify it in Registry Editor, but it will have no effect.

Wrong type of the value cannot be fixed directly, the only way is to delete this value and create a new one with the same name but correct type REG_DWORD.

After that, change of this value starts to work as intended:

0 - sets modern UWP dialog (default),

1 - old-style (legacy) print dialog.

As for Win32 API, the functions RegQueryValueEx(), then RegDeleteValue() if need and RegSetValueEx() work well in Windows 11 and solve this problem automatically. I don't add the code here, but it's simple enough.

Answer 3

There is no way on my Windows 11 22H2 to restore the beloved win32 print dialog.

My workflow is to right click a pic in file explorer and tweak with the wonderful default options.

Did you try the registry edit linked in the selected answer? That worked for me (at least for the time being). Here it is again for convenience: https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/restore-legacy-print-dialog-windows-11/