Encoding problem while exporting report to PDF

[Former Member]

Hi everyone

We have a trouble while exporting Crystal Report with Russian or Lithuanian characters to pdf on web. Some of Lithuanian characters are exported as question marks u201C?u201D. The problem is only if the web project is running on Linux server. On Windows export and printing works fine.

We have tried both WebSphere Application Server 6.1.0.19 and Sun GlassFish v2.1 installed on Ubuntu 9.04.

For the testing purpose we have downloaded u201CAll-In-Oneu201D Eclipse installation (u201CEclipse Ganymede 3.4.1 with Crystal Reports for Eclipseu201D) from businessobjects.com (Crystal Reports for Eclipse version is 2.0.2.r678).

We have done the simplest Crystal Reports Web Project and created a new report with some Lithuanian characters (the report doesn't use any external data source). Then using u201CCrystal Reports->Create Report Viewer JSP...u201D wizard we created standard JSP page with Java code snippets to render report. Then we exported this web project as EAR and run it both on Linux and Windows servers. On Windows server export to pdf works fine, but on Linux not. The same problem is with Russian characters.

Could anybody help, how to set charset or encoding used while printing and exporting report to pdf?

Thanks in advance

Edited by: Judzin on Sep 10, 2009 3:09 PM

[ted_ueda · Accepted solution]

The CR4E 2.0 engine embeds/subsets font glyphs for TrueType fonts into PDF exports. Since this uses a custom built-in encoding for UTF-8, there should be no character encoding issues.

The "?" indicates character encoding issues with the PDF export.

If you open the PDF file in Adobe Reader, and look up Document Properties, does it indicate Embedded fonts with Built-in encoding? Or ANSI encoding?

If ANSI, then the "?" will appear for non-Western European characters.

So what I'm assuming here is this.

1. You created a Crystal Report with fonts available on Windows. Such as Arial.

2. Export to PDF works on Windows, since the fonts are there.

3. You deploy on Linux. The TrueType font ttf files aren't deployed (to the lib/fonts folder of the JRE).

4. Export to PDF on Linux, the Java process tries to retrieve the font info, but it's not there. So it substitues default fonts for Java. Since it substitutes non-embeddable fonts, it uses ANSI encoding in the PDF. Since the characters are not representable in ANSI, it replaces them with "?".

I would first ensure you've deployed the TrueType fonts the report uses to the Java JVM.

Sincerely,

Ted Ueda

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

> I would first ensure you've deployed the TrueType fonts the report uses to the Java JVM.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ted Ueda

Can you elaborate on this please? I'm seeing this issue exporting to PDF on a solaris box. I took the ArialUni.ttf font off my pc and ftp'd it binary format to the solaris box in the lib/fonts directory, but this did not fix the issue.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

hello , i was facing same issue as disscussed above  , after copying TTF from windows Enviornment to linux -->> /usr/libs/jvm/java-1.6/jre/lib to this location . i am able to see PDF but without data ,please note that if i export that same report in exel it contains data as well , please guide me what is missing ?

i will be highly thankful

Best Regards

Abid

[Former Member]

Thank you very much!

It's work!