I recently discovered that the PDFs exported by the Fast Report's PDF export filter aren't displayed correctly in Mac OSX, iOS and Android devices.
Fast Report informed that their pdf implementation only support Windows and they can't say when the new implementation that they are working on will be available.
I also tried to use the Gnostice export filter, but their demo installer didn't work in Delphi XE and when I contacted them, they took 15 days to send me some attached dcus which also didn't work. So I'm searching for another option.
If you know or use a PDF export filter which works with Fast Report, please let me know.
November 2015: Fast Report now have PDF/A support, with this option enabled the PDFs are fine on all platforms.
October 2014 - Fast Report 5 still seems to generate "Windows-only" PDF. A production-ready solution for this problem would be a benefit for cross-platform developers, given that Fast Report is the report generator bundled with Delphi.
Here is a fresh example generated with the Fast Report 5 demo, displayed with Adobe Reader 11 on Android 4.4:
And on Windows:
The Export method is 'table'. When exporting to Excel format a dialogue opens requesting output file settings. - Open Excel after export : exported file is opened immediately after export. Export features: Microsoft Excel must be installed on your PC.
Fast Report informed that their pdf implementation only support Windows and they can't say when the new implementation that they are working on will be available.
I'm not sure that should be taken literally, considering PDF is supposed to be a cross platform format. It more likely means they don't actually have the time, equipment or expertise to test with those platforms. The PDF export filter that I'm using is the one built into Fast Report! It surely has some bugs, but I managed to work around them. And I think that might also work for you: Start with a simple document that does export properly, start adding features until it brakes, then you know what brakes it and you'll know how to work around the problem.
From my experience, here's what got me into trouble:
Also make sure you test using ADOBE Reader, on any of the given platforms. If it works with the Adobe reader but doesn't work with other readers, there might be a bug in the 3rd party reader!
Edit: Here (link) is a sample PDF document generated by my Fast Reports application. I have no idea what kinds of documents you generate, but in my book that's a mighty complex document. Notice the diagonal line that starts where the table data ends, notice the embedded images (bar code, stamp, signature).
I opened that document on the following mobile devices:
About the PDF format: A document is "PDF" if it conforms to the standard, here's some Wikipedia info on that. In theory a PDF document should render exactly the same way any way you look at it, but there are forces at play that might work against this:
AFAIK you can export your Fast Report pages as metafiles (i.e. vectorial Windows format, which is in fact a raw serialization of GDI commands).
Then you could be able to render those metafiles into PDF using our Open Source SynPDF library. It works from Delphi 5 up to XE, is Unicode ready, can embed true type fonts, and even create PDF/A files.
It is also able to export metafiles included in reports as vectorial pictures (and not bitmaps), and could therefore highly increase the pdf quality and at the same time shrink its size.
See for instance how it can be used for QuickReport. A similar technical should be used with Fast Report.
The Gnostice support answered my e-mail which I reported that their trial installer didn't work and send me some tips about which could be the problem and I was able to install it.
The company I work for already bought me a license and I already replaced the Fast Report Export Filter, which was a task as simple as droping 2 components on the same Form as the frxReport Object and setting 2 or 3 properties.
Also, to export the report programatically was also 2 lines of code and the information was easily found in their FAQ.
In the end, based on the recomendations and after looking for other options just to find abandoned components which doesn't have any updates for years, the Gnostice eDocEngine was the best solution.
Just hope they make their installer a little more "Programmer Friendly" as if it had complained about the lack of Fast Report's units in the search path I would've been able to at least have an idea of what was going on, instead of just getting an error and blaming them for having a trial installer which didn't work.
After replacing the filter and generating the PDF's using the eDocEngine component, the PDFs now work the same in iOS, OSX and Android.
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