Exporting to PDF in CR 13 for VS 2015 decreases font size

[reginafalange]

Hi.

We need to show a new report in our website giving the users the chance to download it (using Export to PDF). Users are complaining about the decreasing font size issue seeing the remarkable differences between two reports, the one shown in the website, which displayed the actual Verdana 9, and the PDF exported one, which decreases the font to Verdana 7.5.

We’ve learnt about the solution of changing the registry key entry ForceLargerFonts, but this will affect around 200 already developed reports which are produced by this server. But we need to set ForceLargerFonts for this particular report...

So the questions are:

1. Is there a way to implement ForceLargerFonts per report? We’ve found this thread http://scn.sap.com/thread/1893426 from 2011 and we’re wondering if there has been any progress since then.
2. Is there some tool to mass-convert our already developed reports? I.e. some tool to convert the fonts of the existing reports to the size actually displayed in the PDF, so we can then set ForceLargerFonts in that server.
3. It’s also mentioned in that thread that ForceLargerFonts have to be used with care, since you may get into issues where text becomes hidden or overlaps. Is there a KB article giving more details about these issues? We haven’t been able to find any.
4. Any other idea somebody has come up with? We really don’t know how to proceed with this, setting ForceLargerFonts and then manually changing 200 reports is unfeasible for us, and then there’s the issue of the problems we may run into down the road. But we really need to fix this new report.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Regina

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Regina,

No unfortunately that registry setting is global and cannot be set per report.

Curious, have you looked at your other reports, are they affected in a way they cannot be used? Did you design them so they would fit? Is that the reason you can't change them now?

There may be one possible work around. Open your report and right click on the field with the problem.

Select Format Text and then click on the Paragraph tab. Set the right margin to .7, that should force CR to wrap any words to the next line or possibly scale the font to fit.

Also, for all of our registry key search for KBA 2165260, there may be a few others that might help.

Don

[reginafalange · Accepted solution]

Hi Don.

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

Yes, we designed the previous 200 reports exporting directly to PDF with nothing to compare to, so we weren't aware of this problem. We're afraid that if we changed the registry setting we would have to fit all of them again.

We're going to try your suggestions and read the KBA 2165260 carefully and we'll get back to you with the results.

Thanks,

Regina

[reginafalange · Accepted solution]

Hi again Don.

We’ve been trying your suggestion of setting a right margin for the Text Objects and it hasn’t worked. Most of the Text Objects in our report have pages of text align justified (the report is an insurance policy) and setting the right margin makes the text to be displayed with a margin on the right, thus making the text paragraphs taller. But the font decreases when exporting to PDF as before.

We tried something else, to embed text from Word Documents in OLE Objects instead of Text Objects and the results were encouraging because CR honored the font size in that case. But later we realized about the known issue of only being able to display the first page of the document and it’s impossible for us to know beforehand which sections are going to shown or hidden at run-time so we can’t design the report in this way. ¿Any suggestion in this area?

As you said I’m afraid that changing the registry setting it’s going to be the only solution for us if we want to see the exact font size in both methods of printing (Preview and Export to PDF). But we thought that probably we weren’t the first ones having this problem and maybe someone has come up with something...

Thanks for your help and time,

Regina

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

See this master KBA on how to add a registry key for text:

2165260... There are a few keys that will stop this from happening.

[reginafalange · Accepted solution]

Hi Don,

Thanks for your answer.

In the end, as a last resort, we changed the registry key ForceLargeFonts in the server and, therefore, we had to modify the old 200 reports in order to adjust all the textboxes that now have the real font size.

It has been a lot of work for us, but now it's finished, it's a relief...

On the other hand, we don’t think it's been fair that we had to go through such a hard work, Crystal Reports should have warned us when we buy the product somehow about this issue or simply should have given us a better solution.

Cheers,

Regina

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Regina,

I totally understand... the problem is because we rely on so may third party dependencies and World Wide standards when changes are made it's impossible sometimes to keep up and the only option is to alter the reports.

In this case the font change was due to how the framework handles fonts and the Glyph's within the font that CR uses. HTML had limitations and the only way to make sure your report displayed $1000000 rather than $100000 in your report was to shrink the font by .5 so it would fit into the HTML code tags.... Consequences are the formatting for specifically laid out reports to meet Government standards and the like...

So i agree with you completely, it's not fair but at the same time at least there is a work around...

Thanks again

Don

[reginafalange · Accepted solution]

Hi Don.

Thank you very much for your understanding and for a thorough explanation. We appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Regina