Private and public profiles

Public profiles are visible from all client computers. You are only allowed to create public profiles on the printer server computer. When a client computer connects to the printer server, or when it opens the Printing Preferences dialog, the public profiles are copied from the printer server to the client computer.

You should use public profiles if you want to configure printing options that should be used by several computers in your network. For instance, you can configure a folder where all client computers will save the PDF files.

For public profiles, the options are saved in a file in printer drivers folder, on the server. You should write in public profiles only when you are using a Server edition and your application runs on the printer server computer. Public profiles files are automatically copied from the printer server computer to the client computers. On the client computers, the public profiles file resides in the Application Data folder of the user that connected to the printer.

Public profiles have a flag called "Allow changes on client computers". If this flag is set, the settings in the public profile can be overwritten on client computers. The overwritten settings are kept in registry on client computers.

Private profiles are visible only on the computer where they were created. With private profiles, the generated PDF files are always sent to the computer that initiated the print job. Private profiles are kept in registry on client computer (HKEY_CURRENT_USER).