The customer agreed with me that the amount of time I've spent is plenty, and I've not heard anything back from anyone else getting more than 10 reams of blank paper inserted between two lines in a Crystal Reports PDF file... hmmm did Business Objects buy one of the printer paper distributorships??
I agree that producing a PDF file and then printing that PDF file produces a very nice output, primarily because there is no header/footer text on the printout and the paging is handled a little better than file->print.
Bottom-line, the on-screen report is the end-result of the effort, NOT the PDF file. The user has to push a button to get the PDF and still file->print the PDF.
My (current) solution then became this:
- Make the "View Printable Version" button NOT visible
- Put the standard MasterPage UserControl back onto these report pages and wrap the UserControl with a div tag using a CSS class taken from this page: Printing only specific part of page
- Add a Print.css file to the project taken from this great article by Eric Meyer at A List Apart: CSS Design: Going to Print
So now the report pages can have the consistent MasterPage look without having the header appear on the printed page, but the printed reports have a uniform appearance with the background dropped out.
I'm leaving a candle in the window for a simple PDF solution, or someone that can pull my head out on the Crystal Reports issue, but until one of those happen, at least this works!
Now maybe this headache will go away...