Distance between characters is not correct

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Willy Van Nuffel
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Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Willy Van Nuffel »

When using the PDF-XChange 4 MS-Office add-in (for Excel 2007) (build 199) there seems to be a problem with the font kerning for fonts with a size of less than 10. In the "Arial" font there is problem with the characters W and M (see sample PDF-file). In the "Times New Roman" there is a problem with other characters.

When using the PDF-XChange 4.0 printer, there is no such problem.

We do use Excel 2007-SP2 under Windows XP-SP3.

Can you please have a look at this ?
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Thanks Willy,

I managed to reproduce this at my end, so I made a ticket for our developers:
#1293: Office Add-in 199: Distance between characters is not correct
To allow them to investigate this problem.

We will keep you updated with any news on this case as they become available.

Best,
Stefan
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Willy Van Nuffel,

I spoke with one of the devs working on the office add-ins and he told me that the problem comes from the fact that the office add-in uses 96 dpi as the working resolution - as the screen resolution is also 96 dpi - and this "match" is needed so that the link generation could be correct and fall correctly over the area that is supposed to be the link.

So his recommendation was if you do not need to generate links in a given file with small font size - to use the File -> Print option - as it will correctly place the text where it should be.

We are also investigating how we can improve the resolution (which will fix character positioning) and preserve the correct link placement for the add-in.

Best,
Stefan
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Willy Van Nuffel
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Willy Van Nuffel »

Thanks already for the explanation.

I wonder if it would be possible to use the print resolution to generate the text for the PDF and to use the screen resolution to detect and to generate the hyperlinks? So, the two results could be combined using an "overlay"? Maybe it is not that easy ...

When generating PDF's whe mostly need the possibility to withhold the hyperlinks. In that way it would be nice if you could find a solution for correcting the characterspacing that goes wrong in the PDF-XChange MS Office Add-in (for Excel).

One other thing we remarked (in the MS Office Add-in) is that when the text of a hyperlink consists of more than one word, the hyperlink only works on the first word and not on the others that follow: the presentation of the hyperlink is alright (blue color and all the words underlined), but when putting the mousepointer over the link, the mousepointer only changes to a little hand on the first word, and not on the other words.
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hi Willy,

And thanks for the ideas - I will check them with the guys.

As for the second issue - with just the first word working as a link. Can you please archive and attach here both the originca office file and the resulting PDF - so that we can run tests with it at our end.

Best,
Stefan
Willy Van Nuffel
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Willy Van Nuffel »

With this I send you a sample of an Excel file (and the resulting PDF) in which the hyperlink only works for the first word.

But, I have to say sorry, the problem is not in PDF-XChange, it is already in Excel.
When the column in which the hyperlink resides (column B) just covers the first word of the hyperlink (this is a little bit of coïncidence), than only the word(s) that fall in that column are working as a hyperlink.

So the solution is to enlarge the column so that the complete hyperlink falls into it.
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Willy,

Yes the problem with the links is that they take the size of the cell - so you need to expand the cells so that all the text falls withing the cell boundaries, or merge a few cells if expanding will break the formatting of other elements.

Best,
Stefan
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Re: Distance between characters is not correct

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Willy,

I have some news. Unfortunately we could not resolve ticket:
#1293: Office Add-in 199: Distance between characters is not correct
to a satisfactory level, so we will need to close it for now, and focus on ver3.
We will still keep an eye on this problem, and any possible solutions, but for now we could not find any.

Best,
Stefan
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