I just figured out how to solve an annoying Crystal bug that I have seen, on and off, for years. This bug has to do with text objects that are added using the default font of Arial 10. I don’t see this issue every day but it happens regularly with some customers and even on my own machine.

What happens is that a new text object gets horizontally squished. The characters are sized correctly, but the horizontal space from one character to the next is only about 10% of what it should be, so the characters overlap. You don’t see the problem while you are typing the text (Before), but as soon as you click outside the text object you see the squish (After).

Today I found a report that had this issue, and took the time to experiment.  Here are some factors that might contribute to the problem:

• The report is opened on a PC that uses a different printer driver than the design PC.
• The report is opened on a PC that has a different version of Crystal.
• Your default font for text objects is set to Arial 10 (and possibly other fonts).

If you add a new text object to the report under these conditions, you might see the squish.  For a long time I would have to change the font, change the style (to bold) or change the font size to correct the problem. But now I know two quick ways to eliminate the squish.

1) Go into File > Page Setup, don’t change anything, and click OK.

or

2) Save the report, close it and reopen it.

Either of these should get the font calculations back in line with the new printer driver.

If anyone runs into this situation (or something similar) and the above methods don’t work, please let me know.