Copy 'n' Paste from PDF files generated from SQL Server Reporting Services

Over the last months I've seen more and more customers inquiring about issues when trying to Copy text from PDF files exported from Reporting Services reports and Pasting it into other documents. The issue they were complaining about makes so that pasting of the text fails and instead of the expected text they only get '???????' characters. Especially, some of the users have noticed a change in behavior related to this feature after installing CU6 for SQL Server 2005 SP2; reports that supported this functionality before this package was installed, suddenly stopped working.

I hope to shad some light over this subject and try to explain why some of the text can be exported this way - Copy'n'Paste, and some of the text not and why this happens.

First of all I have to say that the Copy'n'Paste operation from PDF files exported from SSRS is not a supported operation. This means we don't expect this to work as the PDF rendering extension was never designed for this feature.

Having said that, let's see what has changed with CU6 for SQL Server 2005 SP2.

The reason for which Copy’n’Paste doesn’t work as before, after installing CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 is the fact that with CU6 a new logic for dealing with complex text was implemented. After CU6, the decision whether a text is complex or not and is going to be encoded with Glyph IDs instead of ASCII, is done after a different logic than before, thus leading to more text being regarded as complex than before.
According to this new logic, adding a carriage return line feed character is enough to see this text as complex and encode it using Glyph IDs. Encoding the text using Glyph IDs leads to not being able to copy\paste the text anymore. This new logic was added to overcome a different limitation and cannot be reverted at this point.
Because this behavior changed first with Cumulative Update Package 6 - build 9.0.3228.0, any build prior to that should provide more copy/paste
functionality than we currently have. I must however stress that this still doesn’t change the fact that we don’t support this.

Also, SSRS 2008 brings a lot of improvement in the PDF rendering extension and the whole rendering engine. Therefore, you might find that SSRS 2008 behaves better in these situations than SSRS 2005. Still, Copy'n'Paste is not supported even in SSRS 2008.

Having had a lot of requests for this feature, the Product Group has taken this into consideration and is planning to include this functionality sometime in future releases. However we have no estimation yet on when this will happen.

Finally, you will find that text that can be easily encoded in ANSI, also behaves a lot better with Copy'n'Paste than text that contains special, font-specific characters.

HTH,

 Emi