[reportlab-users] TTF, Platypus & Unicode...

[andy robinson]

> It would not be hard to enable the direct usage of Latin-1 texts with
> TTF fonts but I do not want to do that on principle.  Let the user think
> about encodings instead of limiting the choices to an arbitrary subset.
> (Besides it might be too easy to confuse Latin-1 with Windows-1252.)

I agree with this.  I think the encoding should always be made explicit.
There is
a basic assumption that the strings you supply are in the same encoding
as the font you selected; anything else requires "magic conversions"
which will cause chaos as they depend on the fonts and the environment.
The philosophy of Python's Unicode support is "make conversions explicit".

If characters are missing,  maybe your font does not have them?  One useful
utility would be something to dump out the glyphs actually available in a
font.

- Andy