Differences in the appearance of charts that are run in different formats or on different operating systems

IBM® Cognos® Report Studio charts can appear differently when reports are run in different formats or on different operating systems. For example, donut and pie charts can appear smaller in reports that are run on the Linux on System z® operating system compared to the Windows operating system.

The differences in appearance occur only with Report Studio default charts. Report Studio legacy charts are not affected. When default charts are rendered in HTML or PDF, the following font-related problems might occur.

The font that is used in HTML output is different than the font used in PDF output.
Some chart items appear misaligned. For example, a pie chart might show smaller pies in PDF output than in HTML output.
The font that is used in the chart is different from the expected font.
The font that is used in the chart is different when you run the chart in different operating systems.

There are two possible causes to the font-related problems.

The Java™ Runtime Environment (JRE) used by IBM Cognos Business Intelligence did not find the font that is specified in the chart, and substituted the font with a different font.
An unknown default font is specified.

To resolve the problem, ask your administrator to configure JRE to find the installed fonts on the Cognos BI server. There are two ways that you can configure JRE to find the installed fonts:

Copy the installed fonts to the jre/lib/fonts folder.
For example, to use the Cognos BI default font Andale WT, copy Andalewt.ttf from the c10_location/bin/fonts folder to jre/lib/fonts.
Configure the JRE font search path to point to the location where the fonts are installed.
On AIX®, set the shell environment variable JAVA_FONTS=<list of directories>

Tip: Setting this variable is equivalent to setting the properties java.awt.fonts and sun.java2d.fontpath.

The default fonts configuration in your Cognos BI server default style sheet can also cause font-related problems, particularly when the operating system is UNIX. On UNIX systems, fonts must be purchased and installed. To ensure that a specific font is used, perform one of the following tasks:

Ask your administrator to update the Cognos BI server default style sheet to reflect the fonts that are installed on the server.
Update the chart fonts that are used in your report to use that font, and do not rely on any default fonts.

Tip: For information about changing the default font for reports, see the technote How to change the default font for reports in Cognos 8 BI in the IBM Support Portal (http://www.ibm.com/support/).