ABBYY FineReader does not print to Print&Share

Symptoms

When printing a PDF document from ABBYY FineReader 14 (and version 15!) to Print&Share, you are not seeing your document preview in Print&Share for some documents.

Generated spool files from Windows are 0KB in size.

Cause

After being in contact with ABBYY Support, they confirm that they could reproduce this bug in FineReader 14.
On April 11th, 2019, the latest update build 14.0.107.232 did not solve the problem.
We received a fix from ABBYY Support on October 3rd, 2019. The fix only works for FineReader 15, not for version 14, which we originally reported. Part of the ABBYY-solution is upgrading to FR 15.
The bug also applies to FineReader 15 instead of only FineReader 14.

Communication (April 11th, 2019):

We would like to inform you that the reclamation based on the described situation was created. At the moment, the workaround is to perform printing from OCR Editor.

ABBYY Support (April 11th, 2019)

Communication (October 3rd, 2019):

We received a fix from ABBYY support:

It is connected with APDF library which was used in ABBYY FineReader 14. For correct work APDF library should be disabled. ... After that please try to test printing with ABBYY FineReader 15.

ABBYY Support (October 3rd, 2019)

Resolution

Solution 1 (workaround)

ABBYY suggests to use the OCR Editor instead of FineReader 14 as a workaround to open the PDF files and print to Print&Share.

  • Don't use ABBYY FineReader 14, use OCR Editor instead.

Solution 2 (workaround)

Downgrade again to a working version of FineReader (e.g. version 11) or use a different PDF viewer/editor.

  • Don't use ABBYY FineReader 14, downgrade FineReader to another version (e.g. 11).
  • Use another PDF viewer/editor.

Solution 3 (fix)

  • Don't use ABBYY FineReader 14, upgrade FineReader to version 15 and disable APDF library.

Fix

  1. Uninstall FineReader 14
  2. Install FineReader 15
  3. Open Microsoft Notepad and copy/paste this content:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ABBYY\FineReader\15\PDFTransformer\Shell\DebugOptions_Final]
"PrintWithAPDFLOnly"="false"
  1. Save the file as finereader-bugfix-for-printandshare.reg to your desktop. Make sure you use the .reg extension to save it as a registry-file.
  2. Double-click the finereader-bugfix-for-printandshare.reg to apply the patch to the Windows Registry.
  3. Restart your computer.
  4. Print with FineReader 15 to Print&Share.