Oracle Reports 11g Release 1 (11.1.1) provides significant font handling enhancements, as outlined in Table 11-1 (a subset of Table 1-1, "11g Functionality vs. 10g Functionality"):
Table 11-1 11g Font Features vs. 10g Functionality
| 11g New Features | Equivalent 10g Functionality |
|---|---|
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Cross-platform support for TrueType Fonts (TTF) and TrueType Collections (TTC). Report output is in most cases identical on UNIX as on Windows, allowing for simplified cross-platform deployment. Oracle Reports reads the font metrics from the appropriate TTF files to correctly format the report output. This eliminates the issue of text misalignment due to font metrics mismatches. Fonts for which TTF files are available are found automatically. Note that if a TTF font file is not found, then the font lookup mechanism reverts to the pre-11g implementation. New environment variables REPORTS_ENHANCED_FONTHANDLING and REPORTS_FONT_DIRECTORY. |
Possible mismatches between fonts in report output on UNIX and Windows due to different font mechanisms on Windows and UNIX. Font aliasing was required, along with PDF font subsetting. Support for older font file types (for example, AFM) supported. Difficult to get these font types for all fonts. Conversion of TTF to AFM required in many cases, but even these files did not provide the exact output as on Windows. |
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Support for all character sets in PDF. With the new font model, no misalignment will be seen in the PDF subsetted report output. Support for Unicode font subsetting in PDF on UNIX. |
Only multibyte reports supported. PFM and PFA files must be created to resolve text misalignments in UNIX output. Dependence on AFM files. Variable width font output was especially problematic, because Reports was unable to get width of characters beyond the first 256 characters in the file, and assumed fixed width for all these characters, resulting in misalignment. |
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Simplified font management and configuration through Oracle Enterprise Manager. Use Oracle Enterprise Manager to modify aliasing and subsetting entries in |
Configure fonts in |
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PDF, password protection, and security. Specify new command line arguments to password-protect PDF reports generated from Oracle Reports. You can also suppress certain permissions to provide security for the generated PDF reports. |
No capability to encrypt PDF reports or specify security permissions. |
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Font diagnostics. Easy to understand tracing for diagnosis of font issues. Reporting of fonts used, and other debugging tools. |
Difficult to diagnose issues. |