Printing reports

When you create a report in Crystal Reports, the program analyzes the printer that is currently selected for your system to determine font size and how to size and position objects, such as field objects and text objects on the report. If the report is then printed to a printer other than the one selected when it was created, problems with font size, clipped text, and pagination may arise.

With this in mind, consider what may happen when a report is created on one machine, served over the network by a web server on a second machine, and viewed or printed from a web browser through a Report Viewer on a third machine. If each of these machines is connected to a different printer, report formatting problems may be compounded.

Now suppose that a report is designed and formatted on the first machine, where printer settings are used to determine font size and the size and position of objects in the report. When the Page Server generates that report, the printer it is connected to may force the length and size of a font to change. However, the field and text objects maintain a fixed size and position. Thus, generating the report on the Page ServerPage Server may cause text to be clipped or may create extra blank spaces between fields.

If, however, some report objects are formatted with the Can Grow formatting option, these objects resize themselves as the size of the text font is resized by the new printer. Once resized, though, these objects may change the pagination.

The Report Viewer for Java and the DHTML with Frames Viewer display the report in a web browser as it is generated by the Page Server, so these formatting problems may affect how reports appear to users. The Report Viewer for Java allows users who are using IE 4.01 with Service Pack 2 and higher or Netscape 4.72 and higher to print reports. The DHTML with Frames Viewer prints the HTML page exactly as it appears in your web browser. In contrast, the Report Viewer for ActiveX allows you to print a formatted report from a page browser. As a result, an additional level of formatting problems may appear in the printed report if the machine on which the web browser is running is connected to a third printer with different settings.

When designing reports that are viewed through one of the Report Viewers, use report fonts common on all systems to prevent resizing and pagination problems, and always test reports on a client machine before distributing them to users.