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New Blog Posts: Merging Reports - Part 1 and Part 2

Graphic Quality ... gone to the pixels

System crashed last Tuesday and it turns out my daily backups are ... useless for Drive C. All 32 of them. So, my HW guy restored back to the last FULL DISK IMAGE of C/D/E from Oct 2018. I got back the D and E drives, where my Delphi versions 7 and XE7 are installed, but I had to re-install several components because of a lack of synch with the older C drive image. One of those was Report Builder 19.03. It APPEARED that the the install went correctly. No error messages. BUT ...

When I opened the BIG project, I got an immediate "Metafile is Not Valid" message. I closed it and hoped it would right itself when I recompiled it for the first time in a month. Turns out, no, it didn't go away in subsequent restarts. I went to a sub-form, made some changes in a Text Label and recompiled. This problem was that the I got an error. It started with "System Error. Code 5. Access is denied" if runtime, "Raised Exception class EOSError with message 'System Error. Code: 5. Access is denied'. Process stopped" if in the IDE and then it repeated itself. I closed the blank preview and then clicked the print button a second time and it all worked, both in runtime and the IDE. Noisome, but the user understood the need to click through the error message, close the preview and then immediately print again to get the desired result. Still, not optimal.

Having a workaround, I now opened the SMALL SIDE PROJECT and survived loading without messages. I then went into the report designer to work on a report and the JPEG graphic was considerably degraded. I tried replacing it with PNGs and even a BMP version. I also tried to resize the graphic in a graphic editor so that no stretching would be required. The pixel depth seemed to go crazy when I did that, taking a 3x1 graphic that I needed to fit into 1.55x0.5 and changed the pixel depth to EIGHT. I fooled around for awhile and got a fairly sharp 1.55x0.57 version PNG and plugged it in. Better, but not passable in a commercial setting. I looked at every report in the project. EVERY single one was degraded. Not all the graphics, just the logo that was stretched (and sometimes as is, in my experimentations).

Running generates no errors. The Preview and the PDF output differ, but that's nothing new. The text is readable and without problems, despite many accent marks. But that logo ...

Where do I go to fix this ... embroglio, that I find myself in? Am I facing a complete re-install of both versions? Is there some unit or test I can add that will lead me to the issue with graphic metafiles?

Thanks in advance for any offered help. GM

Comments

  • Hi

    >>The Preview and the PDF output differ, but that's nothing new. The text is readable and without >>problems, despite many accent marks. But that logo ...

    I have these problems, i too.

    Are there any fix / workaround ?


    Rio 10.3.1 and RB 19.04 ( no speicial fix )



  • Please update your profile to include your first and last name so that we can address you properly.

    Be sure the PDFSettings.ScaleImages property is False to ensure the original image is exported to the PDF file.


    Best Regards,

    Nico Cizik
    Digital Metaphors
    http://www.digital-metaphors.com
  • Nico, well within his rights, noted that my support had expired. Thus, I continued to work on this on my own. My eventual cheat was to create a font with the logo IN the font. When I next stuck it in there, I used my custom font and ran it at 96pt. The effect was surprisingly usable. I'd have liked a fix from ReportBuilder, but I didn't have a licence renewal in the budget. I still use RB19, but lately, I export to both Excel and Pagemaker and beautify the raw stuff from there. If it's simple and doesn't use graphics, I reach for RB quickly and happily. Anything else, I run it to Pagemaker using tags. Not a solution for everyone, but it works for me. GM
  • edited June 2019
    PDFSettings.ScaleImages property is already False, don't work
  • Hi Mauro,

    Please create a simple, minimal Delphi example that we can build and run in the debugger. Use standard Delphi components and RB. Also include any images as separate files. Send in zip format to support@digital-metaphors.com.

    Best regards,

    Nard Moseley
    Digital Metaphors
    www.digital-metaphors.com
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