The scenario is this, you develop a Crystal Report, it looks wonderful on your development workstation but when you deploy it to another workstation or a production server, it doesn’t generate correctly. The font used maybe incorrect, the font size maybe off, there maybe funny characters here and there, the margins may look different. Here are things you need to investigate:
- The default printer is causing the issue. Crystal Reports (probably because it was originally built in a different era) is heavily tethered to the printers that are installed on the computer. In fact, if you want to extend the width of a report you have to have a printer installed on the computer (whether you have that printer or not) that supports long page widths (which, is also a hack to get really long width reports that you may use for say, a spreadsheet with a lot of horizontal columns). Get rid of any excess printers you have installed that you don’t use. Also, try to make sure the same default printer is used between the development machine and the machine you’re deploying too (or at least make sure it’s installed on both). The physical printer doesn’t have to be attached to both. The print drivers are the #1 reason this occurs in my experience.
- If the fonts are off, make sure that the font’s you are using are installed on both workstations.