The output of the Financials Report Generator layouts are based on usage of fonts with fixed width (fixed width font/mono-spaced font). A fixed width font is a font whose letters each occupy the same amount of space.
The reason why the Report Generator needs to use a font of fixed width is due to the fact that the lines in the report are written as one string of characters and the space between the written characters has been calculated and adjusted according to the report layout defined in the basic data for the given report like e.g. number of columns, column widths and indentation.
In order for the data in report columns to be correctly aligned instead of misaligned, it is necessary to use a fixed width font. This means that if it is desired to output the report in a different font other than what is currently defined in the layouts from IFS R&D, which is Courier New, then the selected layout font must be a fixed width font. Otherwise the output of the report will be misaligned and and the output will not look good when printed
Use this page when you want to know how to handle fonts in Financials Report Generator layouts.
In past IFS Applications releases the Financials Report Generator only supported the Report Builder technology to print reports. In IFS Applications 7.5 a patch was delivered that introduced support also for Report Designer technology. In IFS Applications 8 only the Report Designer based solution is supported.
The Report Designer based solution has some limitations, since it is not possible to keep a report model for each and every report. This means that it is not, as for other reports, possible to modify the model with respect to specific layout items. The layout is instead consists of line items that represents character strings that are created by the Report Generator. The line information is thus not split into smaller pieces, the smallest part is the line itself.
To output the line in a nice way it is necessary to use fonts with fixed width, i.e. fixed width font/mono-spaced font.
For the Report Designer layouts there will not be any specific predefined layouts for Japanese characters.
Instead the customer can install and setup the font to use when printing reports with Japanese characters, based on language setting when printing/previewing the report.
See the Manage Substitution Fonts in the Administration guide for more information.
Remember that the chosen font for the Financials Report Generator must be a font with fixed width. IFS Application delivers a font named sazanami-gothic that supports Japanese characters