Ligatures not exporting to PDF after migrating to Windows Server 2012 - pdf

Since migrating from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012, ligatures (eg. "fi") are getting replaced with X's when a report is exported to PDF. This occurs when exporting directly from Report Builder 3.0 on the server, and also from any Dynamics CRM 2011 client. The version of SQLServer/SRSS is 2012.
These same reports and same font (Calluna Regular) have always worked fine for us on Windows 2008/SQL 2008. I have observed that on 2012 the ligatures are visible in the text from Report Builder before exporting whereas on 2008 you do not see them at all.
So what can I fix to be able to continue exporting all text successfully? I should add we are viewing the PDFs with Adobe Reader 11.0.07.
Happy to provide screenshots to illustrate the problem, but not sure how to attach them here as this is my first post. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer.

As a workaround, I used FontForge to remove the ligature glyphs from the font in question. So that one's solved but I'm sure it will come up again. Interesting that a different TT font also containing ligatures renders to PDF just fine, although it does it using the individual letters not the ligature. The problem must be in how the PDFs are created by SRSS; any further insights from anyone will be appreciated.

Related

Font problem in PDF export after reporting services migration

Our reporting services migrated from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2016. In one specific report, a particular field of looks different on the pdf export. The font that's specified in the report rdl file for that specific field was internally designed a long time ago. We thought the problem had to do with it not being installed in the new server and we proceeded to installing it. After the installation, the result looked different (meaning that the recently installed font was being used) but still very different from the pdf export on the original server. Keep in mind that the rdl files for the report are exactly the same.
My questions is: is it possible to configure some kind of font mapping at server level, so it will replace one font for other, when exporting to pdf?
Any other ideas that explain why the same rdl file looks different in the two SSRS servers when exported to PDF?
Thanks in advance!

SSRS using Identity-H encoded font on Norwegian letters makes PDF text search not work

We have recently upgraded some of our servers running reporting services. The servers are now running Windows Server 2016 and SSRS 2014. Previously we where running SSRS 2008.
I'm not sure if my problem is related to the OS upgrade, or the SSRS upgrade.
The problem is that after the upgrade, reports rendered to PDF have started to do some font/text replacing-magic on all textblocks containing a norwegian character (æ, ø, å).
SSRS is embedding a new font with identity-h encoding, and apparently corrupting the underlying text. The PDF looks good. But text-search in adobe reader doesn't work on the affected textblock. And if I copy-paste the text into notepad, the entire line containing a norwegian character is garbled.
The affected .rdl is using Arial as font. Arial should support norwegian characters, so I'm not sure why SSRS is trying to do this. Arial is installed on the server.
How can I stop SSRS from doing this identity-h replacing?
Or if SSRS is correct to do so, how can I make searching and copy-pasting work?
Found a thread with identical issue on the msdn forums, they reported it as a bug to Microsoft, who responded like this:
"Posted by Microsoft on 18.04.2016 at 23:58:
We've addressed this issue in SQL Server 2016. Thanks for taking the time to submit the feedback." link
The solution is apparently to upgrade to SQL Server 2016.

Error opening an .RPT Crystal Report file

I have a crystal report .RPT file which was created in 2004. I am having trouble opening it using software like VB or Crystal Report. It shows "Failed to open Document", follow by "Invalid Report Schema". Seems like the file itself it corrupted, but there is an application generating reports using this file that is still running fine, and it is able to read the file without any problem.
Is there any other software I can use to possibly open this file up? I need to edit the formula expression in a couple fields. When I tried NotePad++, it shows a bunch of unreadable characters which don't help at all. By the way, this file seems to be consisted with a bunch of reports. (There are about 10 reports within this .RPT file.)
I am not sure what the problem is here, could anyone please help me? Any help/suggestion is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
In that era of Crystal Reports, version 10 would have been the current release. Through version 10, .rpt files could not be successfully opened by any version earlier than the version which last saved the file. Ergo, to open and edit the file, you need the designer/editor for the version which produced that file, or else a newer designer/editor.
If your current Crystal Developer tool wont open it, then it is from a newer one than you are using, or it is truly corrupted ( but since you say it is running well within an application then it's almost certainly not corrupted ).
You need to determine specifically what version of Designer DLL is being invoked by the application that is running the report. Open the source code project and look at the REFERENCES, get the name and GUID of the CRAXDRT.DLL ( or CRAXDDRT.DLL ) and then find exactly that entry in the registry. There you will see which version of Crystal Designer deployed that CRAXDRT.DLL. THAT is the edition you should be able to open the file with.
If you dont have that edition in house, you will have to go to SAP ( or eBay , etc ) and buy one. The oldest SAP sells now is version 11, which should be able to open 8.5 rpts and above. version 11 no longer has support from SAP ( yes, they sell it but no longer sell support, I know, it was only a week ago I talked to them about upgrading my v10 to something newer ). And v12 support is soon to be dropped.
It looks like you are at the crossroads of a Crystal upgrade. If you are still working with VB6 as your application language, then V11 R2 is probably your best bet. g'luck.. I feel your pain. I been there.

Crystal Reports & VBScript - Could Not Locate Automation Class

First off, I have very little Crystal Reports experience, so apologies in advance if this is a stupid question. I had this "fantastic" work project dumped on me when a co-worker left, so I'm hoping someone can help as most of the Business Objects links I find that might have solutions just redirect to a generic SAP splash page.
So I have a few hundred Crystal Reports (mostly File Schema 10.2, although some are 8.5 or 12.0) that are stored on a server. All of them have an associated VBScript file that calls them in the following way:
Set AppCrystal = WScript.CreateObject("CrystalRuntime.Application.10")
Set CrystalReport = AppCrystal.OpenReport("<file path to report>")
Set CrystalOptions = CrystalReport.exportOptions
CrystalOptions.DestinationType = 1
CrystalOptions.FormatType = 36
CrystalOptions.DiskFileName = "<file path to output excel file>"
CrystalReport.Export False
According to BO, this should be correct. See the following links about the CR API:
http://devlibrary.businessobjects.com/businessobjectsxi/en/en/RDC_SDK/rdc_com_dg_doc/doc/rdcsdk_com_doc/RDC_ObjectModel62.html
http://devlibrary.businessobjects.com/businessobjectsxi/en/en/RDC_SDK/rdc_com_dg_doc/doc/rdcsdk_com_doc/RDC_ObjectModel151.html#1387900
http://devlibrary.businessobjects.com/businessobjectsxi/en/en/RDC_SDK/rdc_com_dg_doc/doc/rdcsdk_com_doc/RDC_ObjectModel8.html#1646326
So basically the script just executes the report and outputs it to an Excel file. This works great on the old server, but when I try to execute this script on the new server I get the following error:
I assume this is because there's some kind of runtime components I need to install, but I can't for the life of me figure out what. I found this page: https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=56787567
But none of the files I've tried to download have worked, and, frankly, I've found SAPs documentation to be sub-par in this area. I do have Crystal Reports 2008 available, so if I need to update the vbscript to use CrystalRuntime.Application.12 or something and then install the newest runtime files for Crystal Reports 2008 on the server, that'd be fine. But I still need to know what runtime files to use? Nothing I can find has worked. Help?
Apparently this type of call to a Crystal report uses the RDC Report Engine, unfortunately CR 10 is no longer available. You can still get CR XI R2 which still deployed the RDC and it's version 11.5.
There is no RDC in CR 2008, it was actually deprecated in CR 9 and now no longer shipped.
Only other option you have is to convert your app to use Visual Studio .NET and use one of the current CR 2008 or CR for VS 2010 components and rewrite your app to .NET Framework.
No more VB Scripting supported, but that was just the Dev Language...
I ended up just upgrading to CR 2008, and using .NET console projects to replace the VB scripts.

convert rdl to rdlc?

I am using visual studio 2008 and reporting service 2008.
I created a .rdl reports. Now I want to convert .rdl to .rdlc. How can I do it?
Good question. According to spec whey should be more or less the same, but in reality they differ wildly depending on version. For instance if I open an RDLC file I created in Visual Studio 2010 in Report Builder 3.0 it works. But if I make a change in my RDL(C) file and try to open it in VS2010 I first get asked if I want to convert it to RDLC 2008 format (yes) and then I get the error message "The report definition has an invalid target namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2010/01/reportdefinition' which cannot be upgraded."
There is nothing to convert. All you have to do is to rename the file to .rdlc. This converts it from a server report to a client report. The underlying schema is the same, whether it's an .rdl or .rdlc file.
Take a look at FAQ #8 here: http://www.gotreportviewer.com/
I found working with MS support that converting an RDL to RDLC merely by changing the extensions results in a ReportViewer Control HTTPHandler error which is shown with a style of "dsiplay:none". It accuses the developer of not including the HTTPHandler in the web.config, when it is actually in the web.config. Using an rdlc created by VS in that project, then the reportviewer opens just fine and properly displays. MS support and I are still researching what other changes need to be made, but as of now, I can let people know not to drink the MSDN Kool-Aid.
I also tried changing the schemas namespace in the XML file and I got the same report definition cited above.