ReportViewer does not export PDF for wingdings fonts

[ausadmin]

I hope I am posting this in the correct forum - although it concerns ssrs, I think it is more a winforms / wpf question. We have a wpf application using the winforms reportviewer. This report shows a pass / fail status and I am using wingdings font with chr(0252) to display a tick and chr(0251) to display a cross. This works really well in the report and for sending to a printer, but when exported to pdf both the characters turn info small dots - not really acceptable for our users. I have seen multiple other posts about this issue as a known problem, there this is a post on Microsoft connect [^] that indicates it is fixed (on 5/6/2009). I am wondering if I am missing something obvious on how to obtain a more recent version of ReportViewer that includes a fix? Is anyone else aware of this issue or have a resolution? As this is used in quite a few different reports, I would much prefer to fix the issue, than change all the reports to use different characters or fonts. Thanks, Tim

[phil o]

Obviously the fix will be part of SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP3 (didn't search for release date). So maybe wait until this fix has been released and see if it did the trick ? (I often had to wait for fixes using SSRS during past 3 years) Or, if you don't want to wait for the fix, maybe you could use images to replace these special characters ? Rdp file's size will grow but you'll be able to display it regardless of the media.

[ausadmin]

Paul, Thanks for your comments, and sorry for the slow follow up. The connect posting was from 5/6/2009 and I thought the release had now happened (the post was from some 18 months ago). I have now installed the ReportViewer 2010 Redistributable (v10.0 of ReportViewer), however this did not resolve the issue. Now, instead of the tick and cross turning into a dot, they turn into an empty small box. As I have these characters contained in multiple reports, I did not want to have to change them. Thanks for any further help. Regards, Tim

[ausadmin]

I have worked around this problem by using the characters 0080 and 0079 from the Wingdings 2 font. I think because these codes are below 127 they do get converted correctly in the pdf. I have posted this as an issue at https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/618435/reportviewer-does-not-export-pdf-correctly-for-wingdings-fonts. Tim