Oracle Reports Font Standardization

Question

We need to make our Oracle database and applications Unicode compliant. To do this we have decided to use the UTF8 character set. The NLS_LANG Oracle registry string can be set to use UTF8.
We have decided to use the Andale font. This means the data items in all our forms and reports need to be set to use the Andale font.
With Oracle Forms, a property class can be used but with Oracle Reports I'm not sure how this can be implemented so the font for all our pre-existing reports can be changed in one place. Oracle reports does not have property classes like Forms does. You can create a Reports template that can be selected from the Reports Wizard before the layout is generated but as far as I can tell that would require regenerating the layout for every report every time a font change is required. I don't want to do that I just want to have it changed from a reference like Forms has with the property class that can be inherited.
Do you know how Oracle Reports works in this regard? Is there a clean way to set up Oracle Reports so the font for all data items can be changed in one place or will I have to manually change it for every desired item in every report? There is also the possibility of creating a custom Oracle registry string for font and using that but I don't know if that is a good idea.
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Answer 1

Hello,
If Cyrillic or any other locale served by a single-byte font is the only requirement, then it is easier to achieve success. You can use UTF8 in your database, and use the appropriate single-byte character set in your Reports environment (e.g., Windows 1251 for Cyrillic). There are still issues that may need to be resolved - for example, Reports doesn't generate the corresponding IANA characterset marking at the beginning of the HTML file, nor put the specific codepage marking at the beginning of the RTF file to force the respective applications to use the correct codepage if it isn't the user's default. But most of the issues are pretty straightforward to remedy in one fashion or another.
In general, to get past a wealth of issues today (e.g., availability of fonts, performance, issues with graphs, printer drivers), it's generally easier to set up multiple web/application server environments, each one dedicated to serve a particular locale or range of locales (e.g., Western European). This can be front-ended by a generic servlet that senses the user's browser settings, and redirects to the appropriate environment.
Note for Reports 9i, we've rev'ed up to PDF 1.3 format, and provide support for font embedding and subsetting, and also multibyte support via the 4 Asian font packs that Adobe offers as options for the Acrobat Reader.
There are other locale-specific and multi-locale improvements to Reports 9i, too. But a pure UNICODE web/application server environment will remain a challenge to implement for a few awhile, yet.
Regards,
The Oracle Reports Team --skw