Export to PDF - Support exporting of vector EMF and WMF images in native PDF commands

One more vote here to solve this issue, we need to send PDF's to our customers with graphs and we are a bit embarrassed for its quality at the moment.

I want to add my voice to the others asking for a solution. We have an important client who just wrote "The branding and colors doesn’t seem in line for [brand1] and [brand2] with what is in our asset library and the charts still look messy.These reports are presented to ownership groups and have to look professional for budget meetings. What are the options for getting these reports to where they need to be? "
If she can't live with "this is as good as it gets", we will have to use another control suite.

+1 on this issue. Currently you seem to convert vector images to raster when exporting to PDF, but this is not a option. I eventually had to purchase Active Reports to retain vector images when exported to PDF. I really would prefer to go back to using DevExpress though. Please bang some heads together in R&D and get this one sorted.

Add me to the list of customers that need this also!

+1. Because of the issue, we still used ActiveReports instead of XtraReports. The most important thing in reporting is the visual rendering. If visual rendering is not acceptable then XtraReports is not a acceptable too.

+1. I totally agree with the above. If this is not solved, we will need to look at other alternatives.

+1. XtraReports and XtraCharts really suffer from this bad implementation. There are a lot of problems concerning pdf and print quality in those modules. I will not list the various tickets (which are all answered with " currently no solution planned or in development) but you find lots of them in the support system (no transparency in pdf export, vector formats get rendered to a bitmap before print or pdf export etc.) We are subscribing your product for several years now. Every year there is a new release with new fancy features which probably only a small amount of people need (except that they look cool in the product demo) With every release I have the hope that you fix some of the core problems - most of the times disappointed. Why don't you fix these pdf/printing issues which would solve a lot of problems your paying customers encounter every day? As a lot of the comments say: In the current state these components are not really usable for professional needs!
I would be very happy if you could come up with a better answer than "This is complicated and we do not plan a fix" How many of your subscribers must be gathered for supporting this change request in order to make you react on it? If you tell me a number, I will start searching for supporters!

+1 I'm also wondering how many customers you need to ask for this before you implement it? How many more 'votes' are needed to get this elevated and executed?

Have to agree. It is frustrating to continually have to defend the quality of these pdfs to our internal and external customers. I'm trying the method above (thanks, Peter Thorpe!), but feel like this kind of foolishness is amateurish to have to perform. To me, this is a BUG that needs fixing, not some minor improvement/nice-to-have…

simply have to add my voice (again), to emphasize I am still waiting for this improvement after some 5 years since I initially created a similar request myself.

I expect that this issue be solved as soon as possible. It's very undesirable to buy the devexpress suite and find this kind of problems without solving from so time ago.

Luis -- you should prepare yourself to be disappointed. From what I can tell DevExpress has no plans to resolve this issue.

I think they will, when there are enough requests/complains about it. As fas as I know, DevExpress works with a counter for each request. The more counts, the higher the priority. That's why I would like to know where we are with this request. 25%, 50%, … of total needed?

Friends:
   We really appreciate the feedback and are working hard to ensure you have the best reporting product. Rest assured that we take this suggestion seriously and are trying to budget time to implement it. Unfortunately we cannot make any promises at this time given the complexity of the task. I do hope you understand.
Thanks!
Seth Juarez

Years ago, during a rewrite of our flagship internal product, I was tasked with selecting a component suite to replace one that was full of bugs and causing too many delays.
I settled on DevExpress based on what I saw in your support system: timely responses from smart, professional and informed people that cared. It seemed to me that DevExpress took a conservative approach to features in favor of quality. These ethos are critical for us. It translates into accurate estimations of our abilities.
I still believe that these qualities make up DevExpress's DNA, but this PDF defect is a real litmus test that defines the company. If my view of DevExpress is true, then this glaring issue with the reporting suite should be a huge embarrassment that no amount of effort could discourage fixing it.
Pride aside, I'm sad to say, the defect raises the specter of ethics and false advertising. Professional looking charts are intrinsic to an Enterprise Reporting Suite. The use of PDFs for online transmission and consumption of reports is so common as to be a standard since this issue was submitted many years ago. It's ridiculous that customers should need to argue or petition for it!
From http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Reporting/
"Multi-Platform Reporting - When only the best will do. The No-Compromise banded report designer and viewer …"
I think anyone would agree that pixelated graphics in a professional report constitutes a compromise. When such a compromise is allowed to continue for so long, there is no way that the product can be considered the best of its kind.
After years of developing with DevExpress and tens of thousands of dollars in licensing, we are well entrenched with your software solution. So far, we have been quite happy with our choice. The quality of the product has been high and the support we've received has been great. This issue, however, is of great concern. We are forced to use another solution for some of our reporting needs. What's worse is knowing that we are invested in a company that is not willing to resolve a fundamental problem with their product. This is precisely what we were trying to avoid when we selected DevExpress.
Before long, it will be time to renew our subscription. Once again, we will consider why we must pay for two competing products. The extra expense has been tolerated, but the notion that we are at the mercy of a company unwilling to correct their product which we depend on is not tolerable.
I really hope I'm proven right about DevExpress and their commitment to quality. I'm a fan and it's painful to lose a hero.

Thanks for the update Seth.
However this suggestion was made over 5 years ago (May of 2008) – and in November 2008 a similar response to the one you just provided was given by Alan from DevExpress.
Therefore based on this information, and this alone, it appears that us that this issue is no where on the DevExpress planning board. If this issue is not going to be addressed that is fine – but just tell us that so we can either migrate to a different product, or sit tight knowing that a solution will soon be available.
The carrot on a stick has become quite rotten and I'm tired of looking at it. It's not even orange anymore…

@corey: three thumps up!
@richard: love the one with the carrot!
@Seth:
Appreciated and understood, however, I would have preferred to hear that you are reassigning resources and priorize this to finally deal with this bug (as Alan called it years ago).
I felt the need to dig a bit in my history of questions and bug reports and found the following list, all of which come down to this same problem of PDF quality of charts.
http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/B50370 (6 years ago)
http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/S91919
 -> Feedback from Alan: We treat this problem as a bug in our current XtraCharts and XtraPrinting implementation. (5 years ago)
http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/Q242162 (4 years ago)
http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/S31631 (4 years ago)
What do we have to do to get this escalated?

Hello
I have been discussing this with Julian directly over the past few months and have had the following responses, the "good" news is that there is a chance this may be implemented this year. The bad news is there is no firm committment, or set timescale of when this year.
Response in November
"
While I agree that this new feature would be valuable, we currently have no plans to implement it in the near future (it’s not part of 12.2, which we release next week, for example). Nevertheless I shall be bringing it up again (as in “let’s improve our export to PDF across the board”) during our planning summit in two weeks’ time. I can make no promises however.
"
Response today after another chase
"It’s possible that this will be added this year – the team realize that this is a shortcoming and should be rectified. However, I am not at liberty to state what the timetable is for adding it, so until we have more news, I would recommend that you view it as possible but not definite."
Considering how major this problem is, I share in everyone elses frustration about the lack of action on this but at least there has now been an admission from the top that this is a shortcoming and a vague desire to resolve it this year
Cheers
Paul

For those of you who dont know who Julian is, I am referring to Julian Bucknell, CEO of DevExpress

Blimey I had forgotten about this… I think they really should improve the native PDF exports, especially as one of their major competitors has a native pdf export from their own active report engine that has full vector output from wmf / emf and their own charting controls.
Its a shame because DevExpress beat them hands down with all their visual controls.

Which competitor?

I dont think im allowed to say on here but all I can say is that we tried all of the report generators and found most had the same problem as devexpress, but ONE did not!

The key for devexpress is to use METAFILES… we know they can draw the chart control to a metafile object as one of the above solutions does. In Fact Peters soution is part way to the solution for them.
They they need to play the metafile back onto the PDF rendering canvas.
I assume their renderer works in the same way as others, in that it converts the standard GDI drawing commands into PDF language?

Richard Spurgeon -- I'd really be interested in learning what product you found. If you are not comfortable sharing that information here I can understand. Is there a Twitter account that we could perhaps check outside of the scope of this ticket? @RichardWest

Just my +1 on this. I recently bought DevExpress for some controls and the amazing reporting tools, notably the end user designer. However, the way charts are rendered inside PDF is just plain ugly and immediately noticeable. I hope vector rendering will soon become a priority for the DX team.

Friends:
  I am not sure what more I can say. We are also very concerned that this feature is not yet available and are working hard to remedy the problem. I want this to work as badly as anyone else. I also completely understand the merits of having this feature. I just simply can't say when it will be ready. I know this is not a comfort to everyone who needs the feature this very instant, but I hope it will convince you that we are doing our best. As soon as we have news I will be the first to relay the information. Thanks again for your patience.
-Seth

Is this ready yet? Will it be soon? I have decided to order the product based on a demo. Of course, no one has time to check every possible feature in the product before ordering and built software with it.
Now I'm also not sure if I should renew the license now or look for another product (I know which the ONE product is :). At least I won’t recommend it to anyone for now. It’s because the customers complains about the quality of the chart images in reports (also when they save chart image to WMF). They have complained for a while, I couldn’t do anything about it; eventually they stopped mentioning the problem. But, in their eyes, we are incompetent amateurs, which is frustrating, just because of this years old unexpected issue :(
As some other commenter said, this issue was reported in 2008 and DevExpress team did nothing to fix it (for 5 years). That is what the problem is, not the issue itself. There are also a number of other features (bug fixes) I’m missing in the product (chart wizard for WPF and table rendering in exported RTF reports for instance), but I can’t be sure if the team will ever work on them even if it says it will.

I want to be fair with you. We do not have immediate plans to introduce this feature due to the reasons mentioned before.
Yes, we do understand that this is a fairly mature, but highly demanded functionality. I assure you that we did not forget about it, and our team still wants to provide this feature, but not in the near future.
To my regret, I cannot offer you an immediate solution or workaround because of complexity of this request. Please keep this ticket in your Favorites to stay informed of our progress.

What I cannot comprehend is that DevEx is aware that this is a severe drawback to their solution but does not allocate the ressources necessary to fix it, however large these may be. They seems to prefer decorating the house although the walls are not stable. btw: this thread is older than 6 years as a number of similar threads have been posted even earlier, all refering to the same innate problem.

+1 for this , I need it !

has this feature developped in 13.1?

This functionality is not yet implemented. We will update this ticket once this feature enters the pre-production state.

Don't you guys plan to release this future with the next version of your tools?

I too would be interested in this feature.
Furthermore, it would be nice if we could include .eps of .pdf images in our reports as well!

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+1
Non sense having such a poor quality rendering with a so nice reporting tool…
You now have to give us an estimation of when this feature will be implemented, as we'll be able to evaluate if we have to move to another reporting system. Tks.

To my regret, I cannot provide you with an estimate on when this functionality will be available. Once this feature enters the pre-production state, we will update this ticket accordingly.
Please keep tracking this ticket to stay informed of our progress.

Is there any update on the above ?

Hi Marcin,
As I mentioned above, once we have any results, we will update this ticket accordingly.

Too busy implementing Windows 8 style live tiles for the desktop, heh ? That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

This issue was opened 6 years ago.
It is not on any active development schedule. Period.
It's time to accept this -- and move on.

I do not want to move on. I LOVE DevEx. However, even though it appears to be a tough task I simply cannot understand that they do not see how much of a serious drawback that is to their whole reporting solution. This issue is btw at least 8 years old as Richards thread was only one of many all related to the same innate problem.

The Reporting component does not appear to be important to DevExpress.
Looking at what gets released, and more importantly, what gets advertised by DevExpress, it's clear that this is an unimportant product within the other products that they offer.
Therefore I completely understand why this issue has not be addressed. It would just be nice if they would come out and say -- "No, we are never going to implement this. If you must have this feature then DevExpress is not for you." There is nothing wrong with their decision. What is wrong is the continuous carrot on a stick approach that they have handled this issue with.
That is unacceptable.

It's not the reporting component that gives the problems, it's the underlaying printing component if you ask me.
They should have fixed this a long time ago. Also the richtext within the reporting/printing tool is a disaster when exported to html/pdf/… It's time they deliver on this issue!

Just keeping this discussion alive. I am not a developer but a user of a CRM package which uses DevExpress. My main concern is that the documents which I have to send to our clients are not looking as smooth, crisp and professional as I want them to be, because of the poor (rasterized) image quality. I really wonder why this is still an issue after six years. And it will not be solved "within the near future" according to DevExpress, although they acknowledge that this is a "highly demanded functionality".
What could possibly be the reason for this ongoing lingering?!

Jesse,
The current PDF export mechanism does not allow us to easily integrate the described functionality. As you correctly stated, we know that this functionality is highly demanded. We are researching ways to rewrite the export engine, so we can integrate this feature with as few breaking changes as possible.

Thank you Ingvar. It sounds like you have been investigating it recently. I think its very important that you do rewrite it because our customers all demand the highest quality outputs and don't like it when we tell them there is nothing we can do.
In the end we had to buy Active Reports and use that instead for the reporting but there is no doubt that the DevExpress controls are by far the best so now we use DevExpress for form / web controls and Active Reports for reporting. Ideally we will switch back when you rewrite the export to at least match the standard of your competition.
So here's hoping for 2014!!!

Thank you for your feedback, Richard! I greatly appreciate it.

Hi,
Ok, with this workaround the quality of chart is improved.
What about increasing quality of the XRPicturebox ? Will you do the same way that with the XRChart?
Regards.
YP

Hi,
If your XRPictureBox contains the EMF or WMF image, you can utilize the same approach as with XRChart. In other words, create a scaled image instead of the original one and pass it to the brick. If you have any difficulties implementing this, let me know.

Do you have a solution for 3D charts ?

I am afraid it is impossible to increase the quality of 3D charts this way, because this type of charts does not support exporting to EMF and WMF formats.

okay - i'm out of this thread - 6 years since i gave my first feedback. Simpler to advise clients to buy adobe pro to get nice pdf's than to get you guys to finally resolve this as a top prio. this is sad - it's really the first time you disappoint me. but nevermind, nobody is perfect. same for companies.