404 Tech Support

Silently install CutePDF Writer without the Ask toolbar

CutePDF Writer is a neat little utility that installs a printer on your computer. Anything that you print to that printer (documents, images, web pages, etc.) gets saved as a .PDF file. I like this sort of utility because they’re free ways to create PDF files and I find that to be an even better print preview function and it saves paper when I can keep things digitally.

The only thing I don’t like about CutePDF Writer is that it comes with a little bit of bloat with the Ask Toolbar and wanting to set your browser homepage to Ask.com but you can uncheck these options during the install. You can also choose to not install those things during a silent install.

To silently install CutePDF, we’ll need two components downloaded as well as 7-zip installed. You must download Ghostscript (available from CutePDF’s website) and you must download the CutePDF Writer installer.

Once you have both of those files downloaded, unblock them and right-click on the converter executable and choose to extract under the 7-Zip submenu. This will give us 3 files and a directory.

You can now install Ghostscript silently by running the command on the extracted setup executable: setup.exe -s

After Ghostscript is installed, run the command: cutewriter.exe /verysilent /no3d

The /no3d parameter tells it to not install the Ask Toolbar and to not set the ‘Ask search as browser homepage’ setting.

You can use those commands in your scripts or application management utilities to get CutePDF installed with no user interaction.