[reportlab-users] Achieving uniform spacing in a text object

Jeff Kowalczyk reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Fri, 23 Aug 2002 12:20:09 -0400 

Is there a way to achieve uniform spacing of characters, without relying on
the monospaced-ness of fonts like courier.

The attached example is helvetica (proportional), but if you change it to
courier, it is still very sensitive to spacing drift. I was fiddling with
7.78 and 7.79 in courier, and still not getting the later chars to align.

I guess what I'm looking for is a sane way to grid the characters out,
regardless of the font. It would be a nice API addition to textobject, if
possible: something like setCharSpaceGrid().


# CharSpacingTest.py - Test monospacing chars with proportional fonts
from reportlab.pdfgen.canvas import Canvas

Courier = 'Courier'
Helvetica = 'Helvetica'

class Form:
    def __init__(self, **kw):
        self.pdfpath = kw.get('pdfpath', 'CharSpacingTest.pdf')
        self.verbose = kw.get('verbose', 0)
        self.text_font = kw.get('typeface', Courier)
        self.text_size = kw.get('fontsize', 10)
        self.canvas = Canvas(self.pdfpath)
        self.__draw_grid()
        self.__draw_filled_boxes()


    FilledBoxes = [ \
        ( 100, 700, 20, '01234567890!,ABCDEFG', ),
        ]

    def __draw_filled_boxes(self):
        c = self.canvas
        boxwidth = 15
        boxheight = 15
        for x1, y1, chars, filler in self.FilledBoxes:
            xlist = range(x1, x1+(chars*boxwidth)+1, boxwidth)
            ylist = [y1, y1+boxheight]
            c.setLineWidth(0.25)
            c.setStrokeGray(0.25)
            c.grid(xlist,ylist)
            c.setStrokeGray(0)
            t = c.beginText(x1,y1+3)
            t.setFont(Helvetica,12)
            t.setCharSpace(7.5)
            t.textOut(filler)
            c.drawText(t)
            t = None

    def __draw_grid(self):
        c = self.canvas
        xlist = range(0, 620, 20)
        ylist = range(0, 900, 20)
        c.setLineWidth(0.05)
        c.setStrokeGray(0.25)
        c.grid(xlist,ylist)
        for x in xlist:
            t = c.beginText(x,ylist[36])
            t.setFont(Helvetica,6)
            t.textOut(str(x))
            c.drawText(t)
        for y in ylist:
            t = c.beginText(xlist[10],y)
            t.setFont(Helvetica,6)
            t.textOut(str(y))
            c.drawText(t)
        c.setStrokeGray(1.0)

    def save(self):
        self.canvas.save()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from Fields import test_pattern
    form = Form()
    #form.populate(test_pattern())
    form.save()



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`
end