Tim Mackey's Weblog

I have a few reports in my web application that i export in PDF format only.  You would think this would remove any printer driver complications but apparently not.
Crystal Reports have a surprisingly good article to help troubleshoot issues with printing or exporting a report.

The problem i was finding was that in a Text object or Unbound field, the text would be truncated at the edge of the box boundary.  Some users have reported strange mid-word wrapping, but mine was a different problem, actually hacking off the end of each line.  This didn't happen on my dev machine, but it did happen on the server (2003).  When i compared them side by side, the Times New Roman font on the server was stretched by about 5% compared to my dev machine.
with the help of the CR article, i tracked it down to the lack of any printer installed on the server, i had also disabled the Print Spooler service which was preventing even the Microsoft Office Document Imaging Printer from being available.  So i started the print spooler service and made sure that the Office Imaging Printer was marked as the default printer.  Then i went back to Visual Studio and set all the reports to use the Office Imaging printer.  This solved the problem. 

You could of course install a PDF only printer such as PrimoPDF if you didn't have MS office installed on the server. As long as the server has the same printer installed as the one set in the report design, everything turns out fine.