SSRS using Identity-H encoded font on Norwegian letters makes PDF text search not work

3
votes

We have recently upgraded some of our servers running reporting services. The servers are now running Windows Server 2016 and SSRS 2014. Previously we where running SSRS 2008.

I'm not sure if my problem is related to the OS upgrade, or the SSRS upgrade.

The problem is that after the upgrade, reports rendered to PDF have started to do some font/text replacing-magic on all textblocks containing a norwegian character (æ, ø, å).

SSRS is embedding a new font with identity-h encoding, and apparently corrupting the underlying text. The PDF looks good. But text-search in adobe reader doesn't work on the affected textblock. And if I copy-paste the text into notepad, the entire line containing a norwegian character is garbled.

The affected .rdl is using Arial as font. Arial should support norwegian characters, so I'm not sure why SSRS is trying to do this. Arial is installed on the server.

How can I stop SSRS from doing this identity-h replacing?
Or if SSRS is correct to do so, how can I make searching and copy-pasting work?

1
pdfreporting-servicesfontsembedded-fonts
Kind of a bypass question, but is Arial Unicode available? (and does that also lead to seemingly corrupted text?) – Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried installing Arial Unicode, didn't help. I also tried changing the .rdl to use Arial Unicode, didn't help. – Torstein

1 Answers

1
votes

Found a thread with identical issue on the msdn forums, they reported it as a bug to Microsoft, who responded like this:

"Posted by Microsoft on 18.04.2016 at 23:58:
We've addressed this issue in SQL Server 2016. Thanks for taking the time to submit the feedback." link

The solution is apparently to upgrade to SQL Server 2016.