Learning Curves: My adventure into the world of Blender 3D, and the scene I created in the space of a (self-constrained) week.
After watching various YouTube tutorials (mostly by Andrew Price aka Blender Guru) on the excellent open source software that is Blender, I decided it was time to have a go at a scene of my own. Following some advice from another YouTube video (also by Andrew Price, see links below) I gave myself a single week to complete the task. The duration itself is arbitrary, the point is that I gave myself a solid deadline. And now I’d like to proudly present the result:
Lab scene in Blender. Click for full size.
Now, I am fully aware that there are a number of areas that can be improved, or are just plain wrong. But the point of this exercise was to create and complete (and by complete I mean ‘stop working on it, tweak no more’) a rendered 3D scene. I’m fairly pleased with it, given that it’s a first effort, but I only spent about 30 minutes in the compositor, and that control desk needs a texture, and I’m not happy with the colour balance of the final render, etc, etc.
The above scene was created in Blender 2.79 RC2, although the final release is out now. Also check out 2.80, the Eevee viewport looks very cool!
Gonna make a note of this now as I’ve just spent 2 days looking for a quick resolution to the much-mentioned ‘Crystal Report PDF Export Font Size’ issue.
The Problem
Exporting a Crystal Report to a PDF causes a reduction in font size. Simple as that really. The problem does not manifest when printing ‘to’ a PDF via software such as Foxit (can’t recommend Foxit enough by the way, so much better than the Adobe bloatwhale). However this wasn’t an option as I wanted to export programatically, and needed to set the file name.
[quads id=1]
The ‘Crystal Report PDF Export’ Fix
If you’ve spent any amount of time researching this issue on the Internet then you have no doubt seen several different registry keys to edit, add or modify. After trying various different entries the one that worked for me is as follows:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Crystal Reports\Export\Pdf
Just add a DWORD value named ForceLargerFonts to the above registry key, with a value of 1. Why we still need to do this in 2015 when it appears the issue has been round for years is beyond me. SAP/Business Objects – sort it out.
My Environment
This is on my 64-bit Windows 8.1 workstation machine running Visual Studio 2013 & Crystal Runtime 13.0.12. I’ve noticed that as of time of writing (16-04-2015) that there’s a new service pack. I’ve not tested this new SP but I’m gonna hazard a guess that it hasn’t been fixed.
And thanks to…
The following sites were helpful in resolving this issue, but I don’t think any of them had the solution that worked for me. That said, my Google Fu may have been weakened by my frustration so may have missed it.
I’m using Visual Studio 2013 Professional, and I love it. I’m getting deep into WPF & XAML, and it’s a great IDE for development in that area. For reference, here’s the version info from the ‘About’ window.
Visual Studio Professional 2013 Version 12.0.30723.00 Update 3
However, I’m having a number of issues. I have detailed these below.
Issue 1:The object invoked has disconnected from its clients
Occasionally, when attempting to start debugging, I get the following error:
Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging. The object invoked has disconnected from its clients.
Odd. Start debugging again, and most of the time it will start without issue.
Occasionally, also when starting debugging, I get the following error. Sometimes the error mentioned above in Issue 1 appears alongside, sometimes not:
The object has been run down by the stub manager while there are external clients.
Again, if I restart debugging for the application usually it will start without a hitch.
Occasionally (I see a trend beginning to emerge here), Intellisense doesn’t sense. I have to type at least 2 characters of the Method, or Property or whatever, then delete one character. At this point, the matching member will appear.
This issue only appears occasionally – I’ve just tested it again to get a screenshot and of course, Intellisense worked fine.
Issue 4: There were (not) Build Errors.
Occasionally (definite trend established!), and this one is the most frustrating of the lot, Visual Studio 2013 will tell me that it can’t build the solution as there were errors. Except there are not. There’s nothing in the ‘Error List’, not even a warning.
There were (not) build errors.
Based on various forum suggestions I’ve tried ‘Run as Administrator’, and I’ve tried deleting the .suo user settings file. I have also tried also deleting the bin folder in the Solution folder but to no avail. Another suggestion was to turn on detailed output in Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run. This didn’t reveal anything. The only thing that works is restarting Visual Studio.
I won’t say that the above issues are ruining my experience with VS2013 Update 3, but they are little niggles that need to be ironed out. Also, I should mention that I wasn’t having any of the above issues with Update 2, however I was using that on Windows 8, not 8.1 which I am now using.
If anyone can shed any light on the above problems, then please let me know in the comments.
