Formatting text in Crystal Reports

Question

I need users to be able to enter text in a webform with some basic formatting options and then generate a report showing the formatted text.

The support for HTML is horrible and entering a simple bulletlist doesn't even show properly in the report.

Right now i'm using a textarea with tinyMCE but that's because i don't know what else to use.

Is there a known best-practice for showing formatted text in a Crystal Report?

Edit

I just need to show a report with a bunch of text and icons. Users need to be able to save it to PDF. I doesn't even have to be Crystal Reports but it's what i have been using and worked so far. Until i needed to show formatted text. I wish for another solution that comes with a designer and let's me bind against a DataSet.

Answer 1

The solution is to convert the HTML to RTF. RTF support in CR is much better than it is for HTML. This way users can still use the tinyMCE editor and even paste Word formatted HTML.

The way i convert the HTML to RTF if using an XSL stylesheet. Basically you load the HTML as an XML document and let the XSL translate it to RTF. This way you also have a lot of freedom over the way your text will appear since you can tweak the XSL.

I used this article to achieve that, the article's attachment includes the .XSL.