Tabulation problems in sheets

[DavidM]

Hello.

I am experiencing problems while printing/create pdf from a sheet with tabs in static text.
Tabs are perfectly displayed, but they are not printing correctly nor shown in pdf. Instead, spaces are shown.

What can I do?

Thanks in advance.
David.

[jsalmon]

You might just need to update to a more recent version of Open Dental for printing tabs.
However, I was able to duplicate tabs not showing up when creating PDFs. I'll submit a potential bug ticket and to see if we have control over how invisible characters are treated when printing PDFs.

[DavidM]

Hello, Jason.

Thank you very much.
I have been able to print tabs after updating to a more recent version of Open Dental.
However, as you say, the problem persists when printing PDFs.
I will expect a patch for this.

Thanks again.
David M.

[jsalmon]

I wouldn't "expect" one. I'm pretty sure the Adobe.dll we're currently using doesn't have the capabilities for designating how to draw tabs when manually creating (drawing really) a PDF. We might get lucky and there might be an updated dll that we can use. Hopefully there is something we can do (like we did for printing) but it isn't completely in our hands which is why I can't guarantee you a patch.

[jsalmon]

My previous post is slightly incorrect, it isn't Adobes fault but instead PdfSharps fault. Luckily they are Open Source and I was able to take a peek at their source code (even their newest version) and was able to determine that they still have yet to implement tabs in their "DrawString" logic. The good news is that I now know what to do in order to manually add tabs in for PDF creation so this will be a bug that will get "fixed" even though it requires a lot of duct tape.

[jsalmon]

I took a couple stabs at manually writing the logic for making tabs show up on PDFs and each time I think I'm done I figure out a way to break it to where the tabs on the PDF do something much different than what the printing does. I'm going to chalk this up as a feature request for us to use a different PDF creator dll that supports tabs.
http://www.opendental.com/manual/featurerequests.html

You can easily get around this issue by either using spaces instead of tabs OR get the same affect that tabs give by making separate static text boxes (e.g. if tabs are used to indent text, just make a separate text field that is indented which will give the same look and feel).