Printing in Safepay
I am very annoyed that I can't print to a PDF file and I can't change printers when I want to print. This restriction is making me think that I've chosen the wrong product. If this is not "fixed" when my renewal comes around, I will go elsewhere for my online security.
Comments
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Hello @Ekim and welcome to the Community!
Are you using a physical printer or a virtual printer (such as NitroPDF, PDF Creator or Microsoft XPS)?
Virtual printers are not supported in Safepay. Most virtual printers open windows in the initial desktop and block Safepay's secure desktop while waiting for your input. In the event you are using a physical printer, turn OFF firewall, restart Safepay and check if you can print afterwards.
Regards
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Yes, it is so inconvenient not to be able to use a virtual print to PDF facility that I disabled Safepay. I set print to PDF as my DEFAULT PRINTER but Safepay still won't allow it. It looks so silly that I had to use my phone to photograph the screen!
I agree with Ekin - I will look at other solutions once my subscription expires, if this way of doing things is not resolved.
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The reason I want to print to PDF in Safepay is that I am away from my desk/office. I need the option of printing say a financial institution receipt or other legal document and having it available to add as an email attachment and to have the convenience of printing it whenever and wherever I like. I hit print in Safepay, the screen blinks and I have no idea if anything at all happened. Then when I go back into Settings, Printers I find it has printed multiple times to the default printer which of course is not connected. Not good enough and not I believe too difficult to solve.
My only other option is to transact outside of Bitdefender VPN and Safepay which defeats the purpose and as a new customer makes me question whether I chose the right supplier.
Please respond.
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Hello @iwood and welcome to the Community!
Are you using a physical printer or a virtual printer (such as NitroPDF, PDF Creator or Microsoft XPS)?
In the event you are using a physical printer, turn OFF firewall first. Restart Safepay and check if you can print afterwards. If this works, add your printer IP to Network exceptions in Firewall settings using this article:
If you are using a virtual printer, as per my above comment, kindly be advised that virtual printers are not supported in Safepay. Most virtual printers open windows in the initial desktop and block Safepay's secure desktop while waiting for your input.
I hope the information is helpful. Please note that you can also enable a VPN connection when using a virtual printer and this way all data transmitted will be safely encrypted.
Regards
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Hi,
@Alexandru_BD I can understand the reasons for not printing to a virtual printer. However, as you can see in this thread (and you might have numbers on how often people are visiting this page, because they have the same problem), this is something essential for most of us. There has to be a possibility to save a PDF of a printout. If this can't be done (for stated reasons) with the mechanisms provided by windows, it has to be implemented as a part of Safepay. I can't stress this enough. This is a knock-out criterion. I have been using Safepay despite this major lack but I've had enough now. Are you serious that you expect users to accept that printing to a real printer and scanning the printout is the only way to get (a non-searchable) pdf?
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Hello @HTH7 and thanks for joining the conversation here.
You are right, I can see that this thread has 103 views 🙂 Indeed, this topic has been brought into discussion before and I have also submitted a feature request to our development teams, on behalf of the members of this community, as we have seen interest for this over time.
Personally, I agree that it's something useful and the developers have not dismissed the idea entirely, nor have they confirmed it will be implemented. So, we'll just have to wait and see if it's something they would consider doing in the future. Feature requests are collected from various sources and sometimes they cannot be confirmed, nor declined on the spot, because even though some features may not make their way into production now, they can still be revised later on and considered in future development stages.
It goes without saying that not all ideas will be implemented, of course. If a suggestion is declined from start, usually we announce this and argue the reason behind the decision. As with all new features, they must meet many criteria and certain standards of usage and security, but as a general rule, if the slightest security concern or vulnerability is discovered, the respective feature will not make it into production.
I will follow up on this specific feature.
Regards
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Printing to pdf in Safepay is now a necessary that Bitdefender need to implement since we are talking about environment issues and going green with lesser carbon footprint.
This feature has been requested by users many YEARS ago but the company could not provide a solution shows that it doesn't listen to the customers.
If You're Not Listening To Your Customers, Another Brand Will
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Reading this I understand there are legit reasons to want to print a PDF on a virtual printer for later use (although a download would be more convenient, but I digress). I think the best option would be to add a new setting - something like "Allow printing to virtual printers" - default OFF, like now, and for the users that need to allow printing to such printers, setting this option to ON will not block the printing.
Another thing that I will propose will be to be able to select the printer, showing non-virtual printers when the previous option will be OFF or all of them when it's ON.
This will take a while - I need to propose this to management, get approved, push into the To Do list, deploy, test, release - the whole process. But if it gets approved, it will be done.
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I need virtual printer useable also in Bitdefender. Until this problem is not solved, I will not use it. :-(
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SafePay is a very important part of Bitdefender.
But being able to print to PDF file or PDF printer is an absolute necessity to SafePay.
How this functionality managed to escape the design board is mind-boggling. Because it makes no sense to log in to SafePay to do for instance "banking stuff" and afterwards having to do "banking stuff" outside of SafePay in order to print documentation. That is simply highly ineffective workflow and also a security risk.
Thus it is mandatory to be able to save at least a PDF file as a digital print as documentation when doing "banking stuff" and so it _must_ be a feature of SafePay.
It shouldn't be up for debate, but by all means give me your best shot.
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I agree. It's not about a best shot, you are absolute right, and the software should be useful to the user, and respecting as much the main purpose of being more secure.
To get into more history details: Safepay was designed from the start as an insulated thing. There are a lot of things that can weaken the current protection or introduce vulnerabilities: file open/save dialogs; downloads; and, of course, printing.
Our idea was to avoid virtual printers because of two reasons:
1. there were (are) a lot of buggy printing solutions, which exhibits features like modal dialogs displayed in the default desktop (but with parent in Safepay) and therefore locking Safepay interface *de facto*. Yes, the user could switch back into the default desktop, click a Yes/No button, then switch back into Safepay, which was very cumbersome to do, and even worse, there was no indication that this happened because of a printer modal dialog. Others were simply crashing (one such printer driver computed page dimensions with height as 0, then divided width to height, which obviously lead to a divide by zero crash - that consumed me a week of debugging and it was necessary to modify the inner printing code to avoid this and return a special error).
2. Fake malware printers, where the user could think the page is printing, and in reality the whole page with financial and personal data was captured and sent to the bad guys. Needless to say, faking some mail is bad, but sending a page with all the banking data, reports, numbers and amounts is really bad.
So at the time when we decided that since this is a browser for personal use, the virtual printing did not make much sense, so we imposed the shielding of print to print only on non-virtual ports and to print on the default printer.
That was some 10 years ago. It seems the scenarios evolved in time, and, while it does make sense from a security point of view, we have to consider also these scenarios like virtual printing and printing to files.
The solution I am thinking on is similar with my previous comment; add an option, default OFF; allow the user to decide when printing if a virtual printer is allowed; maybe manage a list of Trusted printers; perhaps add another option "Allow saving to disk". This is not 100% clear for me, since the printing is - believe me - an immense can of worms both from the programming point of view.
Armed with this, I will push this into a story for our management, and one way or another we will deliver. I cannot say at this time when or in what form, but I am confident that it will not take many arguing to convince them the fact you stated - printing is an important part of banking usage and therefore we need to adjust our implementation to allow these scenarios as well.
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Any update on this print to pdf feature?
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Not to sound as an excuse for not getting it yet to the market, but the next thing is to bring Chromium from 116 to the current 118, bug fixes, and the PDF printing is among the next things to do in Safepay on the near horizon.
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