Emoji Rendering Issues in SSRS-Generated PDF

Question

I'm encountering issues with emoji representation in PDF and PowerPoint outputs from SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Despite successfully displaying emojis in Word documents that are rendered through SSRS, the same emojis are not appearing correctly when exported to PDF or PowerPoint; they show up as boxes or question marks. I've updated the config file and am using "Segoe UI" as the font. Notably, when I manually export the Word document to PDF, the emojis are displayed correctly. Why might this discrepancy be occurring with SSRS-rendered PDFs and PowerPoint files, and how can I resolve it?

Answer 1

Hi @Abdullah Riaz,

Fonts are embedded in the PDF file when the following conditions apply:

The font author grants font embedding privileges. Installed fonts include a property that indicates whether the font author intends to allow embedding a font in a document. If the property value is EMBED_NOEMBEDDING, the font isn't embedded in the PDF file. For more information, search for "TTGetEmbeddingType" on msdn.microsoft.com.

The font is TrueType.

Visible items reference fonts in a report. If a font is referenced by an item that has the Hidden property set to True, the font isn't needed to display rendered data and isn't included in the file. Fonts are embedded only when they're needed to display the rendered report data.

If all of these conditions are met for a font, the font is embedded in the PDF file. If one or more of these conditions isn't met, the font isn't embedded in the PDF file.

See Export a paginated report to a PDF file (Report Builder)

In addition, the font of emoji should be Segoe UI Emoji font family.

If these does not work, I'd like to suggest that you may use the picture of emoji and then insert the picture in your report and then export to PDF and PPT to aviod the limitation when export from SSRS report.

Regards，

Zoe Hui

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