title: Crystal Reports - Inserting Random Characters into Report Output
body: <p>Crystal Reports is seemingly randomly adding characters into report output. This is so strange, I almost think we have a virus.</p>
  
  <p>We have been running these same reports with the same version of Crystal reports for a good while now. No one has made changes to the reports and the database data is correct, but the output on the reports now have random characters (usually t's and i's) seemingly inserted at random in between and on top of the text. Even such simple fields as usernames are affected.</p>
  
  <p>It is only doing this with PDF output. Also happens on development machine. Not only limited to server. It is not happening in the integrated Crystal Reports development environment within VS2010. If you preview the report there, it works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Is anyone aware of any Crystal Reports issues that could cause this behavior?</p>
  
  <p>Additional Information:<br>
   - Crystal reports v 10.5.37<br>
   - Running on Windows Server 2008, IIS 7, Also local Win7 dev machines<br>
   - All machines are x64<br>
   - Requested through ASP.Net 4 intranet site<br>
   - Database server is SQL Server 2008 R2</p>
  
  <p>[<strong>UPDATE</strong>]<br>
  We have resolved the issue, though we do not know the actual cause.</p>
  
  <p>In the answer I posted below, it mentioned Calibri causing problems with the PDF output. None of our reports were set to output in Calibri, but they were. We went through all of our reports and re-set the fonts to Arial and now the random letters are gone.</p>
  
  <p>What still bothers me is that these reports were working fine for the past year up until yesterday. Why did it suddenly decide to happen now?</p>
  
  <p>If I find any more information, I will update this question. We greatly appreciate those who took the time to help diagnose the issue.</p>