I asked this question some time ago on the MSDN forums to no avail. I gave up in the end, settling for a make do situation. But having come across this forum I thought, heck, I'll ask it again

The situation is this.

I have a Crystal Report and I have a .NET application. What I want to achieve is a perfect (or as near as possible) match between a CRTextbox on the report (which takes a field from a database) and a RichTextBox in the application. Essentially, I want to know how many lines will fit in the CR textbox and match it with the RTB. So if a user goes over this 'line limit' I can warn them. Unfortunately, the box in the report can't just stretch as it has been designed to be such a size.

Currently, I match up the fonts, get a rough line number whilst editing the report itself, and then use that line number to limit the rtb. However, this limits the text box to plain text. No text formatting etc.

Ideally, I would like to supply the width and height taken from Crystal Reports and some how use them in .NET to give the user all the Rich Text formatting but with warning if they stray over the box size.

Does that make sense? lol.

Any thoughts, nudges in a certain direction, ideas, etc will be appreciated.

Jon.

Brian,

Sorry for the delay in reply.

I have managed to code a system that takes the dimensions of the crystal reports box and is able to work out the various numbers of lines/characters dependent on the font supplied at runtime (from a database). It can then warn the user if they have gone over the available size, irregardless of what font or formatting they use.

So this works well for my needs.  The dimensions are the CR size divided by 15 for the windows form.

What is frustrating, and something I find hard to work out why, is that if I set a different printer to the default, the number of characters that can be printed in the box changes.

If for example, I set the default printer to a laserjet (HP2200 for arguments sake), then launch the report viewer, what I wrote into the box in the windows form (the application) exactly matches the printed version. So line one ends with 'the', line two with 'and', etc.... it matches fine.

Now, if I set the default to a deskjet (HP 990c) and do the same, the number of characters that appear in the box in the report viewer is quite a bit less and the windows form version and the crystal reports version do not match up.

What would be useful to know is whether this is always going to be the way or whether there is a way I can compensate for this.

Thanks,

Jon.

Hi Brian,

I tried your suggestion about selecting no printer - this is the ideal for me if I could know for certain that it would print identically every time on EVERY printer (and all exports to PDF and printing using the 'printtoprinter' method !). Is this something you know is completely printer (and screen dpi, font, etc) independent as it may be the way forward for me. With a printer the form box size is 15th the size of the CR text box. With the no-printer version its like 16.78 or something (as it doesn't allow as many characters per line or indeed as many lines ?? - is it printing all characters fixed width?? this would not be so good?) but I could get it very close I think.

Another frustrating thing is replicating the issues! I have witnessed the amount of characters able to be printed in the box alter when printers change, etc but do think I can replicate the issue tonight for testing. LOL no chance. If anyone can shed some light on this I would appreciate it. I am using CRXIr2 - I think things are printed in a different way to than before?

Meh, maybe I am getting too tired - I've tackled this issue a number of times and given up. I guess I'll carry on down the avenue that the report is designed for laserjets to be printed on laserjets (it seems most laserjets come out roughly the same compared to inkjets). And also leave some additional space in the report just in case the odd word drops down a line and causes the text to go drop off the text box.

Jon.

Edited by DreamState - 18 Apr 2007 at 1:27pm