How can I preserve leading white space in PDF export of reporting services

Question

I have some leagacy reporting data which is accessed from SSRS via an xml web service data source. The service returns one big field containing formatted plain text.

I've been able to preserve white space in the output by replacing space chars with a non-breaking space, however, when exporting to PDF leading white space is not preserved on lines that do not begin with a visible character. So a report that should render like this:

          Report Title
Name      Sales
Bob       100.00
Wendy     199.50

Is rendered like this:

Report Title               (leading white space stripped on this line)
Name      Sales            (intra-line white space is preserved)
Bob       100.00
Wendy     199.50

I've not been able to find any solution other than prefixing each line with a character which I really don't want to do.

Using SQL 2005 SP3

Answer 1

No solution for SSRS 2005, but 2008 does not appear to have the same problem.

Answer 2

You can use padding property of the textbox containing the text. Padding on the left can be increased to add space that does not get stripped on output.