Hi Jeff,

I have tried what you said, and printed a report to a .PS file, and then opened the file with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 professional, which then uses the distiller to create a PDF file. In my PDF file, the text is fully selectable.

But to me this seems a long way around. I have experimented with reports printing them directly to the Adobe PDF driver (Report form myreport to printer prompt, then selecting Adobe PDF). I have tried this with a report that has text and images. I have tried it with behaviour set to 80 and 90. In both cases I get the text & images correctly. However the only thing that does not seem to work correctly with behaviour set to 90, is the rectangular drawn line boxes, and any black fill inside these boxes. It seems to be seeing them as images.

See my message #1035959

I have created a more complex report that uses a report listener to stretch images when they occur. It only runs under behaviour 90. The report is for a color catalogue of 110 pages, with about 12 color images per page, text for each product code, description, and a memo with product details. There is also text for main groups and sub groups of products.

I then run my report listener program (which also sets the listener type = 0), and print directly to Adobe PDF driver.

The report prints to PDF perfectly, with all text fully selectable, and fully searchable. The black lines & borders & fills also look perfect.

The only problem that the commercial print house had was with my rectagular border lines, and black fill inside some rectangular boxes. These black lines & fills were being seen as images, and were seperating into 4 colors, instead of only one color black.

I have since removed the black border rectangle, and two column down lines, and changed the fill color to blue. The catalogue pages still look ok without the lines, so the print house is going ahead with the job.

Another point of interest, all my pages in the VFP preview, are identical to each page in the resultant PDF files. ie page 78 in the PDF appears exactly as page 78 in the VFP preview.

(At one point in the very begining, I was getting a PDF page with images positioned ok but scrabled text all out of position. I discovered the cause was the page number text box was too close to the bottom edge of the page footer. When I moved it slightly higher, the PDF came out perfectly.)

(All my text was is Arial font)

(I have also been able to get the text to come out as graphics, by changing some of the options that the Adobe PDF driver gives you. I can’t remember exactly what it was I changed)

Hopefully I have proved that text can and does work to PDF file.

regards

David Wheeldon


>I hope I'm wrong, but someone is going to have to prove it to me because I don't see it any other way.
>
>In a nutshell what I'm seeing is with 'set reportbehavior 90' if you print to a PostScript file and then distill it the 'text' will not be selectable in Adobe Acrobat 5 or 7. In fact, under Acrobat 7 when you do a Documents/Accessibility Quick Check it will tell you:
>
>"This document appears to contain no text. It may be a scanned image."
>
>I'm sorry, but that makes VFP 9 Report Behavior (RB90) completely useless to me and my customers. Whatever advanced reporting features it may have I can't use. My reports are data that will be consumed by users and used for other purposes like spreadsheets or other documents. Printing to paper is passe. Sure, Report Behavior 90 is great for paper or print preview, but that's not where things are at in this day in age. And having used WC where PDF is King RB90 is ok for reports that the user can only look at or print.
>
>Here's my repo:
>
>use (home() + 'labels') in 0
>select name from labels where recno() < 10 into cursor qlabels
>*create a report named junk and have one field on it, 'name'. Save the report.
>*Strip the expr and tag and tag2 if you want. It doesn't matter.
>set printer to name getprinter() &&and select either the Generic PS Printer or whatever other printer that will let you print a PS file.
>set reportbehavior 80
>report form junk to file junk80.ps
>set reportbehavior 90
>report form junk to file junk90.ps
>
>In Windows Explorer find these two PS files and Distill them or you can use whatever technology you want to distill them incluging the WC PDF class in code.
>
>View the resulting PDFs in either Acrobat 5 or Acrobat 7 or whatever version you have.
>
>Try to use the Text Select tool to snag some text in either and you will see that when RB was 90 it's not text and you cannot grab text.
>
>Please, my kingdom for a workaround!