Problem:
Report output is not formatted correctly (whether printed or saved to PDF). Items are misaligned, completely unreadable (garbage output), or certain fonts are not displaying cleanly. You might even have poundsigns/hashtags where numbers should be.
Answer:
ANYTIME formatting or printing is "goofy" with Crystal Reports, it's related to printers, printer drivers and/or fonts the report was created with. Crystal Reports formats reports based on the printer that was used to create it originally.
If output is messed up, it is not something our software is doing (or not doing) to the report/output. Note, our software is not a re-creation of the Crystal Reports engine. We USE the Crystal runtime engine to process reports.
Here are some possible fixes for output issues:
1) You might try making the report non-dependent on a printer by setting it to "No printer" in Crystal Reports when designing report. This generally will NOT work for barcodes and labels (you usually have to set up the printer to match the same printer it was designed in Crystal for).
2) You can also make sure the report is based on a network printer that Report Runner (and the Crystal runtime engine) has access to (even if it's not printing to paper). This means the same printer driver must be installed, too.
3) Make sure fonts that the report uses are installed and available.
4) If fields are chopped off or you see pound-signs/hashtags, widen those fields in Crystal Reports. If you will always make a field about one character/number wider than the field looks like it needs, you can generally bypass these type formatting problems.
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Here are some additional PDF-related articles:
1) My Images Are Low Resolution and/or Fuzzy When Exported to PDF
2) Unwanted text characters being added to my report when exported to PDF
3) Corrupted IDAutomation Barcodes in PDF Format
