[reportlab-users] ReportLab 1.16 Released

[Andy Robinson]

> > 2.  Ury Harshak's left-to-right patch.
>
> Close relative of Ury Marshak's right-to-left patch ;)

Damn, there are so many command line flags to
patch, I must have got one wrong ;-)
>
> > We're still pondering
> >     the best way to include this without making big changes,
> >     and it's serious enough to do 'just after' a release than
> >     'just before'.
>
> I'll upgrade to 1.16 in the meantime and run it for a while.
> What are the options you are considering (i.e. what are the minimal
> and the maximal sets of changes) ?

Ideally, the Paragraph class should become a fairly thin interface
which defered the actual implementation to delegate objects or
concrete subclasses.    We already have our 'standard paragraph',
and Aaron Watters' new one in platypus/para.py.  It would have
some attributes about text direction, which we design in a general
way.  If a paragraph is not labelled as 'might need RTL stuff', then
we skip straught to our standard implementation.  If it "might need
RTL", either for the whole thing or for sub-portions, then we would
import a module of yours e.g. "rtl.py" which had the classes to do
the work.

So a separate experimental module "rtl" could then be checked in which
localized everything needed.  It could also contain any needed helpers
for labelling chunks of the story as RTL, or whatever else we need.

We would want a "test_rtl.py" which displayed it and tried all
the expected error conditions, and a few paragraphs and examples
for the manual.

I will help with this next week.  We've been very busy but the rest of
November should leave some free time, and this is an important
refactoring
to do, as it will allow anybody to experiment with new  paragraph
implementations.

>
> A piece of bad news is that there's a change necessary that may
> turn out to be somewhat ugly (although localised) - a change in
> the paragraph layout logic when both the '<b>' style tags and
> mixed directions are present, I didn't get to that part yet.

Sounds fun.  I bet you think of 5 more things before we're done :-)

>
> Ury
>
> P.S. Unfortunately my email has changed, if you tried to contact
> me and got no reply, please resend to this address.
>
I'll correspond privately on this; hassle me next week if I don't mail
you by then!

Thanks,

Andy