I am trying to decide on a reporting service to use and so far I have the general feel that many people believe that SSRS is gaining ground on Crystal if it has not already surpassed it. From what I've researched, it seems that looking forward SSRS would be the best choice but one major flaw/weakness that it has opposed to CR is that when it comes to printing the reports CR is much more accurate and user-friendly than SSRS. The reason being is that in order to present most of these reports they must be in either a .pdf or paper format so this would be a major hiccup in regards to choosing SSRS.
Would anyone that has experience with this issue from either the CR or SSRS side have any advice or opinions on this?
The only printing-related feature I've can think of that is difficult in SSRS is the ability to place a background image and print fields on top of that. This can be done, but from what I understand, it is easier in Crystal than SSRS.
When simply creating a report in SSRS, you can easily forget to set some of the PDF related options such as page size and orientation, but if you remember to set these appropriately and preview your report output in PDF, I don't think you'll have many problems. Like printing Excel documents, without some optimization, page breaks can show up in awkward places, but it is easy to fix this, or catch this in desigining the report, if you are aware of the issue.
SSRS doesn't necessarily assume that reports will be printed. The designer is not aimed exclusively at page layout. And some of SSRS's features, such as dynamic expand/collapse of sections, won't work with printed output of course.