SSRS 2008: Strange characters in PDF after exporting report to PDF

Question

I have a set of reports created with SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio 2008.

Reports run on SSRS 2008 and exported to PDF.

In PDF files, however, some of the text cannot be found by "Find". If this text is copied from PDF and pasted into a text document, a strange combination of symbols is pasted - i.e. Copy "1400" from PDF and "1e4d0it0e" is pasted, see screenshot below.

Another strange feature: the same field, in this case "Id", is presented in two tables in the same report, and in the first case some Ids are "garbled" in PDF, but in the second all are rendered correctly. I can see no visible differences between tables.

Any ideas on how to prevent such behaviour?

Answer 1

I found why this is happening, even though it makes no sense to me.

Where the text is displayed properly in the PDF, the textbox has a setting CanGrow=true.

Where the text is "garbled" in PDF after Copy-Paste, the textbox has a setting CanGrow=false.

Changing the setting on the textbox fixes the issue.