Custom Fonts in Web Intelligence

Web Intellience (WebI) is SAP BusinessObjects’ ad-hoc query tool, but in a few cases, we do need to make WebI reports more appealing. By default, you can only choose a few pre-configured fonts to format your WebI reports. How to add custom fonts to WebI is a frequently asked question. In this post, a step-by-step guide of how to add custom fonts is given.

1.     Install the font you want to add to your system. Here, the system means your web clients that accessing Web Intelligence. Actually, you don’t need to have the font on your server system. In this example, I’ll try to add the “Trebuchet MS” to WebI. For Windows users, they should have this font installed by default.

2.     Now edit the fontalias.xml file that can be found under [BOInstallDir]\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\fonts folder. Add the following section.

3.     Now restart the web application server, in my case, Tomcat. Create a new WebI report and select any cell in the report. Now you should discover that “Trebuchet MS” is available in the font drop down menu. Try it out! It should work already!

4. But what if you want to use the beautiful “Trebuchet MS” font as the default font for WebI instead of “Arial”. Edit the i18n.xml file that is under the [BOInstallDir]\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\scripts folder. Under the TTF directive, add the following section.

5. The next step is to edit the defaultConfig.xml file that is in the AnalyticalReporting java web application. For my tomcat installation, it is under [BOInstallDir]\Tomcat55\webapps\AnalyticalReporting\WEB-INF\classes. In this file, the default font used to format different type of cells in the WebI report (freecell, table header, table body, etc…) defined. By default, they are all “Arial”. What I’m gonna do is to replace them all with “Trebuchet MS”. You can, of course, define different font for different type of cells.

6. The change in last step affects the reports created by the DHTML interactive viewer only. If you also want to change the default font for Java Reporting Panel, you should also change the defaultConfig.xml file under [BOInstallDir]\Tomcat55\webapps\AnalyticalReporting\webiApplet\AppletConfig.

7. Finally, restart the web application server again and let’s create a new WebI report to see what we have now. As you can see in the below screenshot, all the fonts are now “Trebuchet MS” by default.