Exporting SSRS reports to PDF when they contain Wingdings with char value above 127

Question

Hey folks,

In Report Builder 2008 I use code such as

=Chr(224)

in textbox expressions to get Wingdings chars such as the up, down, straight arrows, etc. I run the report and it looks fab on screen, as well as exported to Excel.

But if I export to PDF, I've noticed any Wingdings with character values above 127 do not display inside the PDF correctly (just an empty little box.) Inside Acrobat, I go to File-Properties, look at the Fonts tab and I see that Wingdings is successfully embedded, but the encoding is set to ANSI. (If I export a document from OpenOffice using their excellent PDF export feature, the encoding says "Built in" and the Wingdings characters all look great.)

Wingdings under Chr(127) look fine on the SSRS reports. Any idea if I can do anything about the higher chars?

Thanks, Bill

Answer 1

I got an answer over at the official Sql Server Reporting Service forum.

The long and short of it: it's a bug. I'll be filing an issue as Andre Milbrandt suggested.

Answer 2

Workaround: I wanted to use an empty square and a square with a tickbox in it. Originally I was using windings characters 254 and 168.

Basically try to use characters below 128, and don't forget that there's wingdings 2, 3 and webdings. I found Wingdings 2 characters 82 and Wingdings 111 would work instead.

Also, you can mix and match multiple fonts by setting an expression for the font property of your expression.