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

[Henning von Bargen]

I have not tested it.
I assume it works fine, but I don't like the way it is implemented.
I would prefer a more general solution,
where a paragraph is just a list of other flowables.
In the most simple case, these are just words.
But they could also be images or whatever
(just like Minipages in LaTeX).

The HTML-ish way is very useful, but instead of doing
all the work itself, it should only parse the XML and create
such a "general" paragraph. 

In the layout, the flowables belonging to a paragraph are rendered 
from left to right and then top-down. Spacing can be done
automatically, one could even add automatic hyphenation
and block indentation.

There is a small problem with this approach, though:
Text has a base line, other flowables don't have one.
One would require an additional information about the relative y-position
of the base line in a flowable.

A paragraph should be considered as something like a "left-to-right, then
top-down" container.

I even found some of the points mentioned here in the source code
of class Paragraph, but there are no public interfaces and they are not
documented.

Henning