Text spacing is different between Crystal Reports and CrystalReportViewer

[Former Member]

We just upgraded to Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and Crystal Reports XI. Our reports look great on our development environment, but, we when deploy to our server (Running Windows Server 2003), the text in the paragraphs does not look the same. For instance

"The U.S. Army has 23-30 new x. They need to y."

becomes

"The U .S. Army has 23 -30 new x . They need to y ."

It prints correctly, but looks strange in the viewer (client really doesn't like it). All of the text is currently Times New Roman 12 pt. When we change it to a fixed width text like Courrier New, it looks like it should, but the standard is Times New Roman so we can't change the font. We also can't upgrade the servers to another OS. When I open the report up in Crystal Reports on the server (not using the viewer), it also looks fine. Any ideas?

Thank you,

Susan

[former_member208657 · Accepted solution]

You can try playing around with the printer settings a bit for the report. Make sure to select "no printer" in the page or print setup for your report. This will ensure you use a generic printer driver and your output should be more consistent. Also make sure that you are using Left alignment instead of Justified. The Justified could cause your spacing to go a little strange.

I also noticed you are using Crystal Reports XI in Visual Studio 2010. I'd advise you to look at moving to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010. Version XI isn't supported or tested on VS 2010, and the new version CR for VS 2010 is free.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Sorry, we are using the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010. We also have tried playing with the print drivers including setting the option of "No Printer." We've actually tried a number of things including sending the text in as a parameter, saving it using Crystal Reports XI as opposed to the Crystal Reports in VS, doing full justify (which did help, but not enough), creating a brand new report in Visual Studio 2010 since we migrated everything from VS 2008, removing all images and separating each paragraph into its own text box. We are hoping that maybe it is a dll the is part of the Windows 7 OS that isn't on Windows Server 2003 that we can move over. We are looking at possibly using Crystal Server for a reports module we are in the process of designing, but the client won't go for it if we can't fix this problem.

Thank you,

Sisam

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

One more option to try:

In the CR Desinger, go to the Page Setup. Find the option "Dissociate Formatting Page..." and enable this option.

- Ludek

[former_member208657 · Accepted solution]

One source of the difference is the way we calculate the space available to render text in each viewer. When using the Crystal Reports .NET Winform or WPF viewer we use GDIPlus. But when using the embedded designer within Visual Studio the ActiveX Viewer is used which uses libpng10.

These two graphics engines perform their calculations differently, thus the different rendering.

It's not to say that it is okay that there is a difference, but wanted to let you know why. We'd really need to see an example of the difference to see what is going on. If you can show us some screenshots or provide reports as an example we can look deeper at this. You'll need to host screenshots on your own servers or the many image sharing sites available.