FIX: Some text characters are displayed as square glyphs in a report that you design or view by using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

When you design or view a report by using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, you may see square glyphs in the text instead of characters. This problem most frequently occurs when you use East Asian characters in the text. This problem can occur even if the report displays correctly in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or in Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

This problem occurs only when you select a font that does not have the correct glyphs for the text. In SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, the external library that is used for text rendering is changed. This change was made to improve text support for languages that have complex scripts, such as Arabic and some Indic languages. This library requires that you use the correct font for the characters that are used in the text. Otherwise, the square glyphs appear.

The fix for this problem was first released in Cumulative Update 1. For more information about how to obtain this cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Note Because the builds are cumulative, each new fix release contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous SQL Server 2008 fix release. We recommend that you consider applying the most recent fix release that contains this hotfix. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around this problem, use Report Designer to explicitly set the appropriate font for the characters and the script that are used for the text in the report. For example, for text that uses an East Asian script, you can use the Arial Unicode MS font to correctly display the text.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

For more information about how to format text for report items in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, visit the following Microsoft Web sites:A future release of SQL Server Reporting Services will contain improved features in the text rendering engine.

For more information about what files are changed, and for information about any prerequisites to apply the cumulative update package that contains the hotfix that is described in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about the list of builds that are available after the release of SQL Server 2008, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about the Incremental Servicing Model for SQL Server, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about the naming schema for SQL Server updates, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about software update terminology, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: