[reportlab-users] Experience with new-style paragraphs?

[Robin Becker]

In article <ECC92188-DDF0-11D6-9AFC-00039345C610@darwin.in-berlin.de>,
Dinu Gherman <gherman@darwin.in-berlin.de> writes
>I just wonder how to interpret the lack of any feed-back concerning
>Aaron's new-style paragraph class that is supposed to add a whole
>lot of new features, like underlining, hyperlinks, etc.? I haven't
>had a chance to study this in detail, but maybe somone else has a
>few comments to share?
>
>Regards,
>
>Dinu
>
>--
>Dinu C. Gherman
.... I tried it out on many examples and apart from some compatibility
problems it seems fine. I think there were minor differences in the way
lines end up, but probably nothing short of a full tex box model is
going to do a great deal better. It's certainly hard to do widows and
orphans as it is very lazy and stops as soon as an overflow is detected.


My only gripe would be that it's really doing far too much ie it's no
longer a paragraph. There's really not much point in having a single
wrap/draw/split mechanism for such complex stuff. To properly make use
of this approach we need to accept that it's doing all of the layout and
thus need to add additional layout control primitives as tags. Then you
either use the intermediate machine code or just produce a string.

A good thing about this approach though is that it would be relatively
easy to make it very abstract and it could then be used to draw to other
types of canvas.
-- 
Robin Becker