Question

I am using ABCPDF to print a PDF file to a local printer via EMF file. I’ve based this very closely on ABC PDF’s sample “ABCPDFView” project. My application worked fine on my Windows 7 and Windows XP dev boxes, but when I moved to a Windows 2003 test box, simple embedded fonts (like Times New Roman 12) rendered completely wrong (wrong spot, and short and squat, almost like the DPI’s were crazily wrong).

Note that I’ve hardcoded the DPI to 240 here b/c I’m using a weird mainframe print driver that forces 240×240. I can discount that driver as the culprit as, if I save the EMF file locally during print, it shows the same layout problems. If I render to PNG or TIFF files, this looks just fine on all my servers using this same code (put .png in place of .emf). Finally, if I use the ABCPDFView project to manually add in a random text box to my PDF, that text also renders wrong in the EMF file. (Side note, if I print the PDF using Acrobat, the text renders just fine)

Update: I left out a useful point for anyone else having this problem. I can work around the problem by setting RenderTextAsText to “0” (see code below). This forces ABCPDF to render the text as polygons and makes the problem go away. This isn’t a great solution though, as it greatly increases the size of my EMF files, and those polygons don’t render nearly as cleanly in my final print document.

Anyone have any thoughts on the causes of this weird font problem?

private void DoPrintPage(object sender, PrintPageEventArgs e)
  {
      using (Graphics g = e.Graphics)
      {
        //... omitted code to determine the rect, used straight from ABC PDF sample
          mDoc.Rendering.DotsPerInch = 240 ;
          mDoc.Rendering.ColorSpace = "RGB";
          mDoc.Rendering.BitsPerChannel = 8;
          mDoc.SetInfo(0, "RenderTextAsText", "0");//the magic is right here
          byte[] theData = mDoc.Rendering.GetData(".emf");
          using (MemoryStream theStream = new MemoryStream(theData))
          {
              using (Metafile theEMF = new Metafile(theStream))
              {
                  g.DrawImage(theEMF, theRect);
              }
          }
          //... omitted code to move to the next page
      }

Answer 1

I was originally RDPing in with 1920×1080 resolution, by switching to 1024×768 res for RDP, the problem went away. My main program runs as a service, and starting this service from an RDP session w/ 1024×768 fixes it.

I have an email out w/ ABC PDF to see if they can explain this and offer a more elegant solution, but for now this works.

Please note that this is ABC PDF 7, I have no idea if this issue applies to other versions.

Update: ABC PDF support confirmed that its possible the service is caching the display resolution from the person that started the process. They confirmed that they’ve seen some other weird issues with Remote Desktop and encouraged me to use this 1024×768 workaround and/or start the service remotely.