In Crystal Reports you can choose HTML interpretation for a field, and italics, etc. will be rendered properly. It also correctly converts <, >, and & to <, >, and &. To turn on HTML interpretation, select the field (not just the text box if the field is inside a text box), right-click and choose Text Formatting. Text Interpretation is on the Paragraph tab. Choose “HTML Text”.
BUT HTML interpretation does NOT convert <br /> (html code for carriage return). You will be left with those symbols showing up in your report. This is a new problem in Biotics5 because in Biotics4 we used <br> instead of <br />. <br> does convert to a carriage return in Crystal Reports, though <br><br> converts to only a single carriage return. Biotics data now contain a mix of <br> and <br /> codes because <br /> is only inserted when a field is edited; existing data were not converted.
Possible solutions:
- Base the report on a view and in the view use the HTML2CHARC function to convert <br /> and <br> to line feeds (see HTML tags and codes in Biotics5).
- Use the replace function (in a view or in Crystal Reports) to replace <br /> with <br> and live with only 1 carriage return for <br><br> (as you did in Biotics4).
- Export the report to Word (rtf) Editable format and replace <br /> with paragraph marks in Word. (See NS Word macros for use with Biotics and Resolving problems when exporting to Word or Rich Text from Crystal Reports). If you use this approach, either don't turn on HTML interpretation, or ensure that all your data has <br /> and not <br>.