If you are using or considering ZetaFax to distribute Crystal Reports then be aware that ZetaFax seems to have issues with the newer versions of Crystal. I found several postings from people who upgraded Crystal from 8.5 to a later version and found that ZetaFax no longer could read the embedded fax number tags in the report. No one knows for sure why but it appears to be related to the Unicode compliant characters used by Crystal starting with v9. I asked the folks at ZetaFax to comment on the problem and they said they would work on it (see solution below).
One of my customers found that if he put the tags into an OLE object (wordpad) and put the OLE object on the report then ZetaFax picked up the tags correctly. This indicates that something Crystal is doing with the text causes the problem. Of course this isn’t really a solution since the whole point of embedded tags is to use dynamic content within the report to provide the fax number for each page.
I just heard from someone at ZetaFax who says that they think the problem is caused by Crystal sending an ‘image’ rather than text to the printer (I am doubtful). And, they are going to look at the issue and see if they can find a solution. They will let me know.
In the meantime one of my customers in the UK has switched from ZetaFax to ActiveFax (www.actfax.com) and says it works fine with newer versions of Crystal and is even able to read embedded dynamic data in the report.
Zetafax have published a solution in their knowledge base in late November 2006
Thanks Lochbel. Below is a direct link. The fix requires that you put an entry in the ZetaFax registry. If anyone has confirmed that this solves the problem, let me know.
http://www.equisys.com/technotes%5Cztn1459.htm