Iwanted to report back to you on the results of your helpful suggestions re my 4column report of a membership directory that had to suppress many possibleblank lines.The client wanted a PDFfile that could be distributed by email to the membership list.Printing to a PDF file in R:Base (using PRINT?OPTION PDF) had 2 problems in the latest build of R:Base 7.6:
1.Blank extra page at the end 2.PDF file printing about 1700 names was 39 megabytes(larger than the database itself) Here?swhat I found out: 1.Blank extra page at the end 1.Doug Hamilton solved this one: I didn?t realize R:Basewas defaulting to assigning the report a Report Footer and Header (in theReport Designer:menu Reports / ReportFooter is check off).I thought I had tospecifically locate objects in a section to activate it. Just unchecking theReport Footer item solved the problem. 2.The PDF file was 39 megabytes (larger than the databaseitself).This took more trials, andsome ideas I did not test, since I found a solution agreeable to the client. 1.Jim Bentley suggested dropping the page style:I tried this and it only dropped the filesize by a small amount, not significant. 2.Tom Frederick suggested specifically dropping the?embed_used_fonts? option (OPTION PDF|EMBED_USED_FONTS OFF) ? this did notsignificantly reduce the size ? it actually very slightly increased it. 3.Several suggestions actually pointed me in the rightdirection:Jim Bentley suggested gettinga Word add-on to save a file as a PDF, then printing the report to an RTF andconverting in Word to compare.Jim alsosuggested getting PDF creator to compare.Larry thought the issue was that R:Base, with the Rich Text Fields I wasusing with regions to suppress blank lines, was creating graphics objectsinstead of text.Tom Hawley observedthat ?PDFs created by third party software (something other than Adobe Acrobat)often use older versions of the PDF spec which do not compress as well as newerversions. ?He suggested tryingAdobe Acrobat 9.0 All of the above led me to try this, since I had Adobe Acrobat 6.0 on my PC andfrequently use it to print to a PDF with good results: 1.In R:Base, use these commands: 1PRNSETUP ?AdobePDF? 2PRINT reportnameWHERE? ORDER BY?. OPTION PRINTER UsingAcrobat 6.0, the file size decreased from 39 megabytes to about 6 megabytes. 2.Taking this one step further, I upgraded Acrobat from6.0 to 9.0 (warning to all who try this:their web site and download directions are very confusing with multiple windowsopening up all over the place; I ended up accidentally installing not justEnglish but English French and Dutch and it took a VERY long time to downloadand install) I then used the same commands as above.Result: UsingAcrobat 9.0, the file size decreased from 39 megabytes to 356,064 bytes ? areduction of over 100 times smaller. LarryLustig suggested that I could get the same results by using a stored procedure toformat the text and memo fields on the report.Larry, since the client wants this report ASAP and since he was willingto pay the $299.00 to get Adobe 9.0 Standard, we?re going with the abovesolution.Someday I?ll try your solutionas well! Manythanks to all who helped! DavidBlocker "David Blocker [email protected] Office: 781-344-1920 Cell: 339-206-0261"
