I use HP Simplified font in my report. But when I'm trying to export it I get the message.
The selected program does not support the export of one of the functions, which uses
smiling in this report.
The report used partially compatible HP Simplified fonts; Use TrueType font instead of them.
What I need to do, to use this font?
Related
I would like to use some special characters in a MATLAB figure. How can my program ensure the fonts are available before using them?
listfonts() is not reliable. It claims "Zapf Dingbats" is available on my machine, but it is not (and text() renders using a default font instead). listfonts() always includes the standard PostScript fonts. I suppose that's because they are always available for PostScript output, but I'm interested in displayed figures. Likewise uisetfont() and MATLAB -> Preferences -> Fonts -> Custom list "Zapf Dingbats", but render the sample using a default font.
Just looking for the font file doesn't work, either. For example, "Webdings" works fine on my main machine. However, on a second machine, "Webdings" is installed (there's a file /Library/Fonts/Webdings.ttf, and Word can use it), but MATLAB substitutes a default font.
I thought of one test: Create a small figure with one marker symbol, use print() to write it to a .png file, read in the file as data, compute a hash, and compare that hash with a stored value. Is there a less clumsy method?
I found Unicode equivalents for most of the symbols I need, that work for both of my test machines. However, they too apparently depend on my having the right fonts installed. For example, there are many Unicode versions of a square. Hex codes 2588, 25a0, and 25fc work here, but 25fe, 2b1b, and 2bc0 are rendered as blank. Is there a way to tell whether these characters are available?
I'm running R2017b under macOS version 10.13.5, and "set | grep LANG" displays "LANG=en_US.UTF-8".
My Crystal report generates this text:
This is to certify that {FullName} has completed the course
where the formula {Fullname} is: Mr. + Name
I want to change {FullName} to remove the title "Mr". I used Find in Formulas on {FullName} and changed the Display String from Mr. + {?FullName} to {?FullName}. But somehow this replaced every lowercase "t" with "ti". So now the static string is changed to:
This is tio certify tihati .... has successfully completied tihe course
How can I correct this? A key note is that this only happens when exporting to PDF. In the Main Report Preview, the report displays correctly.
What you're describing is a really weird bug involving the Calibri font. Certain glyphs aren't handled correctly when exporting to PDF. The solutions I've found are as follows:
A) Avoid using Calibri fonts in Crystal Reports. You might try a more
common True Type font, such as Arial. Again, be sure that font is
installed on every... workstation.
or
B) Downgrade Crystal Reports to use a legacy Microsoft Uniscribe
component (USP10.dll). Here’s the procedure that we’ve used at
Alterity with good results.
Here are advanced instructions for Solution B, but I'd just recommend changing fonts. I'm sure you can find one very close to Calibri without this issue.
I am using a MATLAB script to tune the control system on a machine. When the tuning is complete, I would like a report containing text (especially serial number, date/time and the values determined during tuning) and plots, especially transfer functions.
What do to you recommend?
Whatever solution I use should be compatible with the MATLAB compiler so I can distribute my solution to a team of field engineers.
Ideally the report will be a PDF document.
The MATLAB report generator does not seem to be the right product as it appears that I have to break up my script into little pieces and embed them in the report template. My script contains opportunities for the user to intervene and change values or reject the tune if plots don't look right and my hunch is that this will be difficult if the code runs from the report generator. Also, I fear code structure and maintainability will be lost if the code structure is determined by the requirements of the report template.
Please comment if my assumptions are wrong.
UPDATE
I have now switched to use the MATLAB Report Generator with release r2016b and it is working very well for my compiled code users. Unfortunately it means that colleagues who have a MATLAB licence need to buy the Report Generator too, to use my tools scripted.
As the MATLAB Report Generator's development manager, I am concerned that this question may leave the wrong impression about the Report Generator's capabilities.
For one thing, the Report Generator does not require you to break a script up into little pieces and run them inside a template. You can do this if you choose and in some circumstances, it makes sense, but it is not a requirement. In fact, many Report Generator applications use a MATLAB script or program to interact with a user, generate data in the MATLAB workspace, and as a final step, generate a report from the workspace data.
Moreover, as of the R2014b version, the MATLAB Report Generator comes with a document generation API, called the DOM API, that allows you to embed document generation statements in a MATLAB program. For example, you can programmatically create a document object, add and format text, paragraphs, tables, images, lists, and subdocuments, and output Microsoft Word, HTML, or PDF output, depending on the output type you select. You can even programmatically fill in the blanks in forms that you create, using Word or an HTML editor.
The API runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms and generates Word and HTML output on all three, without the use of Word. On Windows, it uses Word under the hood to produce PDF output from the Word documents that it generates.
The latest release of the MATLAB Report Generator introduces a PowerPoint API with capabilities similar to the DOM API. If you need to include report generation in your MATLAB application, please don't rule out the MATLAB Report Generator based on past impressions. You may be surprised at just how powerful it has become.
I've done this quite a bit. You're right that MATLAB Report Generator is typically not a great solution. #Max suggests the right approach (automating Word through its COM interface), but I'd add a few extra comments and tips, based on my experiences.
Remember that if you're going with this solution, you are depending that your end-users will be running Windows, and have a copy of Office on their machine. If you want to ultimately produce a PDF report, that will need to be Office 2010 or above.
I would bet that you'll find it easier to automate the report generation in Excel rather than Word. Given that you're producing a report from MATLAB, you'll likely be wanting quite a lot of things in tables of numbers, which are easier to lay out in Excel.
If you are going to do it in Word, the easiest way is to first (without MATLAB) create a template .doc/.docx file, which contains any generic text that will be the same for all reports and blank tables for any information. Turn on track changes, and insert empty comments at each point that you will be filling in information. Then within your report creation routine in MATLAB, connect to Word and iterate through each comment, replacing it with whatever data you wish.
If you are learning to automate Excel from MATLAB, this page from the Excel Interop documentation is really helpful. There's an equivalent one for Word.
Unlike #Max, I've never had good results by saving figures to an .emf file and then inserting them. In theory that does preserve editability, but I've never found that valuable. Instead, get the figure looking right (and the right size) in MATLAB, then copy it to the clipboard with print(figHandle, 'dbitmap') and paste to Excel with Worksheet.Range('A1').PasteSpecial.
To save as a PDF, use Workbook.ExportAsFixedFormat('xlTypePDF', pathToOutputFile).
Hope that helps!
I think you are right about the report generator.
In my opinion the fastest/easiest approach would be to generate the report in a html document. For that you just need the figures and write a text file, conversion should be trivial.
Quite similar approach would be to create a Latex file. And then create a pdf from it - though for this you'd need to install latex on your deployed machines.
Lastly you could use the good integration of Java in Matlab. There are several libraries you could use - like this. But I wonder if all the complication will be worth it.
Have you considered driving Microsoft Word through its ActiveX interface? I've done this in compiled Matlab programs and it works well. Look at the Matlab help for actxserver(): The object you want to create is of type Word.Application.
Edit to add: To get figures into the document, save them as .emf files using the -dmeta argument to print(), then add them to the document like this:
WordServer.Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture(fileName);
The title of the question pretty much tells it all.
When using the java SDK provided by Crystal Reports to export a report as an Excel spread-sheet. Although the cells grow even now, only the first line is visible in the export XLS.
In the Crystal Reports UI, this is achieved by setting the 'Grow' option from the Report Export options.
What parameter must be set so that the corresponding cell visibly grows to accomodate large/multi-line text?
Given the hugely different nature of the 2 formats, exporting to Excel is always tricky. However, I did do a quick test exporting a dummy report from my CR standalone developer version, and replicated & solved your problem.
In your text fields that you want grown, go into the Format Editor->Common and turn on the Can Grow option. It looks like this activates Excel's Wrap Lines option, but unforunately also adds extra rows to make up for it.
My problem was that the field width was set to the width of the matter it contained. What worked eventually was to have the field-width in Crystal Report set to slightly smaller than the matter it is to contain.
Say, the matter to be written is 'Address Line One'.
Set the field in design view such that only 'Address' is visible.
Then set the field to 'Can Grow' with 0 (no-limit) on the number of lines to grow.
When the report is exported to XLS, the cell in XLS will be resized to display the rest of the body.
I'm trying to export a Crystal Report to a text file, while preserving any Unicode characters that are found within. By default, Crystal Reports seems to export to an ANSI text file.
Here is a highly simplified version of what I'm doing:
Dim objCRReport As CRAXDRT.Report
[...]
objCRReport.ExportOptions.FormatType = 8 'crEFTText
objCRReport.ExportOptions.DestinationType = 1 'crEDTDiskFile
objCRReport.ExportOptions.DiskFileName = "C:\reportInTextFormat.txt"
objCRReport.Export blnPromptUser
Since it creates a file in ANSI format, I lose any special characters that were found within the report. These characters are all fine when you view the Crystal Report directly.
Please note that I am referencing the "Crystal Reports 9 ActiveX Designer Runtime Library" specifically.
I want to point out that I've tried pre-creating a Unicode file with the same name prior to the export, hoping the Crystal code would notice the file, and append to it rather than creating an ANSI file, but unfortunately this is not the case.
I then thought I could get around this problem (ninja style) by just exporting to an RTF file (which preserves the characters), then reading the contents of this RTF (minus the formating). I would then create a Unicode text file myself, writing the RTF contents to it. Unfortunately, to achieve this, I had to look into using a RichTextBox, but encountered a slew of problems with that. I think I'd have more success in VB.Net, but unfortunately I'm stuck with VB6 for this task.
After trying those approaches, I found an article that seems to suggest that Crystal Reports 9 supports exporting to a Unicode Text file, but I have yet to see it work. It mentions that the print engine supports it, so I'm going to look deeper to see if I can invoke it, in case the .export isn't doing so itself (which I doubt).
It turns out Crystal relies heavily on the printer driver for Unicode support, so I decided to look into that. Turns out the printer driver had to support Unicode, and this was the case on my test environment. While this was interesting to find out, it didn't solve my problem - I already had a compatible printer driver.
So, finally: after a few days of trying to find a solution to this, my boss decided it was time to cut our losses, and we instead planned for a re-design of the feature, without involving Crystal Report to Text exports. I am still, however, very interested in how to export to a Unicode text file with Crystal - so please do answer if you know how.