Incorrect accented characters on print

j.kokes

Once in a while I keep running into a frustrating problem: On some setups, some international characters in Memos get printed as some other characters. E.g. I want to print a Å™, but it gets printed as ?? (or maybe not the actual Norwegian character but some character which resembles it). The preview itself is OK, which makes me think it's somehow related to fonts available inside a printer (as if FR told the printer, "Print me a Å™ using the Arial font" and the printer used the ?? glyph, because it has the same character code as Å™ in the embedded Arial font). The problem is, I turned just about everything I could think of off, hoping that I would force Windows to print my report as an image rather than a mixture of text and images, but no go - I still keep getting ??'s. But other applications, e.g. Notepad, can print just fine. Is this a known bug of FR 2.5x, or did I overlook some setting in my printer setup, or is it something else? I would appreciate any help, because I just can't figure it out.

j.kokes

Well, I feel like I raped the source code horribly, but at least I got it working: In fr_class.pas, I changed

procedure TfrMemoView.AssignFont(Canvas: TCanvas);
begin
  with Canvas do
  begin           
    SetBkMode(Handle, Transparent);
    Font := Self.Font;
    if not IsPrinting then
      if ScaleY = 1 then
        Font.Height := -Round(Font.Size * 96 / 72 * ScaleY) else
        Font.Height := -Trunc(Font.Size * 96 / 72 * ScaleY);
  end;
end;

to

procedure TfrMemoView.AssignFont(Canvas: TCanvas);
begin
  with Canvas do
  begin           
    SetBkMode(Handle, Transparent);
    Font := Self.Font;
    Font.Charset := EASTEUROPE_CHARSET;
    if not IsPrinting then
      if ScaleY = 1 then
        Font.Height := -Round(Font.Size * 96 / 72 * ScaleY) else
        Font.Height := -Trunc(Font.Size * 96 / 72 * ScaleY);
  end;
end;

I am not sure exactly whether the problem is in TFont.Assign not copying the charset or in FR 2.5x not setting the Font's charset even when it is set in the Report Designer, but the important thing is that this ugly hack works.

j.kokes

The hack I described in the second post seemed to work well enough, so I stopped looking for a better solution.