Hello, I'm using 4.0.3.

And of that I'm using the PDF exporter to export my charts to a pdf file. Converting to an image work perfectly fine.

But the PDF exporter seems to have a lot of problems with column spanning cells. I've got the source code license, so I was able to catch an index out of bounds exception caused by just that. Before that, tables with - say - 6 columns and a cell with a columnspan that spans all the rows gave an index out of bound. Subtracting 1 from the columnspan made it work, but offcourse with an additional empty last cell in the row.

But I fixed that one. Another problem I can't seem to fix (and I'm not sure if it's my code or the pdf exporter) is that bold fonts and even bold lines are simply changed to regular ones (the bold is set with the pen or brush, one of those two). Bold text is marked bold all the way to the PDFGraphics.DrawText() method call in MindFusion.Pdf, but I can't debug further (the source code for that component is not included right?).

Also, I can see a lot of traces saying "Unsupported Brush"... what causes this?

Are these all known issues (couldn't really find anything about them using the search)? And most importantly, are they fixed in later versions? Or is it my own fault?

Hi,

I've sent you the code as an attachment. Did you receive it?

Stoyan

Never mind about the third problem. I was thinking the PDF size was exactly made to fit the chart, but now I know the chart is made to fit the pageSize (which apparently also causes the line breaks, though I'm not sure).

By the way is there any reason not to move to at least version 4.3.1 of the control (the last from the V4 series)? I can see we sent all upgrades up to 5.0.2 to your company, and it's not that easy for us to support a three years old version.

Stoyan

It seems the problem happens because you have a cell whose ColumnSpan == 7 while the table.ColumnCount == 6. Setting the ColumnSpan to 6 should fix that.

I hope that helps,
Stoyan

Man, that was pretty dumb of me. Must've been the Friday thing (that's one hell of an excuse) but I could swear I put some code in there setting the ColumnSpan to 6 and seeing it not work. Then setting it to 5 and seeing it work but with an extra column.

Anyway, doesn't matter, thanks! You really go through a lot of effort (even when it's not even your problem ).

Any ideas on the bold text that's dissapearing. I followed it all the way down to the MindFusion.Pdf calls and "bold" is true... but no bold is printed. Might be my fault too. Maybe it's taking the table font instead of the cell font somehow.

O yeah, I'm using 6.0 here. So that's probably it. I'm downloading a new version to check it out.

As long as I know about this compatibility limitation it's OK.

That clears up that, thanks Stoyo!

It is hard to get the on-screen and PDF text match exactly. In the first case FlowChart.NET calls the Graphics.DrawString to render the text, and DrawString does its own character layout. PDF does not support multiline text, and we try to emulate the DrawString character layout by measuring the text using the PDF font size and adding multiple PDF text tags if a single line won't fit, however that does not guarantee producing the same output since we don't know all intricacies of how DrawString works.

You should get better output when using EnableStyledText - in that case FlowChart.NET uses the same text formatting and layout algorithm both when rendering to the screen and in PDF, but there still might be some differences, since each word is still measured and drawn using different APIs in the different cases.

We have made some improvements to PDF text rendering in FlowChart.NET 5. You might check it and back-port the new layout code if you find it works better.

Stoyan