Frequently Asked Questions on using Barcode Fonts in Crystal Reports

Questions

Questions and Answers

1: What's the minimum version of Crystal Reports to support exporting to PDF?

Crystal Reports 8.5 and above supports PDF exporting. However, in order to embed barcode fonts into PDF, you need version 9 and above.

2: Is there any fix for font embedding issue on CR 8.5?

Not as we are aware of. To get around the issue, either install the font on every computer that will view the PDF, or upgrade.

If you have Acrobat installed on the computer, you can create PDF by printing to distiller (or PDF writer) printer driver.

3: The barcodes in the PDF are much smaller than the ones I printed from Crystal Reports directly.

This is a Crystal Reports bug on CR 8.5, 9 and 10. For version 9 and 10, fixes are available at Business Objects web site http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2017865.asp.

Note that there is no fix for OEM versions, including the one bundled with Visual Studio .Net 2003, and version 8.5. To work around this issue, increase the font size to compensate the size decrease.

4: Barcodes display correctly on the development machine and the server. However, they do not display in Crystal Reports Viewer on client machine.

We do not recommend to use Crystal Reports Viewer to view the report from a different machine. For that purpose we recommend to export the report the PDF file and view the PDF instead.

First, Crystal Reports do not embed fonts. You must have the barcode fonts installed on every client machine in order to view the barcodes. Secondly, if you are using UFL functions in the report, the UFL dll must be installed on the client PC as well - if you are running version 9 and above, we strongly recommend to use formula to eliminate this UFL dependency.

Lastly, you might want to review the troubleshooting guide from Business Objects for other issues http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/cr_troubleshooting_activex_viewer.pdf.