PDF reports drop trailing ')' on negative Sub Total numbers

[Garth Colasurdo]

After upgrading to 9.2.3 (from 9.0.1) we are having a problem with the display of negative numbers that use the formatting D12.2CB. It drops the trailing ')' from the right most column in a sub or grand total.

It only happens on PDFs. HTML and Excel display correctly. Further it only seems to affect the second column after another negative column. The code is written in App Studio and has been working for many years.

Has anyone experienced this or behavior like this?

[David Beagan]

On WebFOCUS 9.1.0 I created this code:

 SET STYLE=WARM
 TABLE FILE GGSALES
 SUM 
 COMPUTE UNITS /D12.2CB = -1 * UNITS;
 COMPUTE DOLLARS2/D12.2CB = -1 * DOLLARS;
 BY REGION
 BY ST
 BY CITY
 ON REGION SUB-TOTAL
 ON TABLE PCHOLD FORMAT PDF
 END

When I run I don't see any dropped parenthesis. What happens when you run in on your release?

[Garth Colasurdo]

When I make a simple test against the Cars sample, I don't get the dropped parenthesis either. However, for our suite of financial reports it started showing up. This makes it hard to share with support. We can't tell if it is an interaction with the PDF engine, style sheets, or a change to the FOCUS code.

[David Beagan]

It looks like some kind of odd bug. You would have to take a copy of one of your reports and start selectively removing parts of the code. Keep doing this until you have a minimal set of code that triggers the error. Hopefully from there you could see what exactly is triggering the issue, and come up with some kind of work around.

[Garth Colasurdo]

Thanks for the feedback. It is a very weird and specific bug. I was hoping someone else may have come across it.

[David Briars]

 

When you open the .pdf in a text editor, to you see the closing ')' OK?  

If so, sounds like a rendering issue of some sort.  

As David, suggests, try taking away some code to see if you can get the ')' to resolve.  

I might try to start with taking away styling.  

 

[Patrick Huebgen]

@Garth Colasurdo - which PDF viewer are you using ? Sometimes I saw rendering issues with the PDF engine built into Chrome or Edge but not in Adobe Reader?

[Garth Colasurdo]

Thanks for those suggestions. The PDFs seem to be formatted correctly by that example.

The PDF engine is both Edge and Reader- I downloaded the extension to see if that had an effect. I got kind of excited that maybe FireFox would be different. But it still renders with the same issue. I might try Safari/Apple Preview out of curiosity. 

I'll have the developer try removing formatting by layers to see if we can see where the anomaly comes in.