[reportlab-users] Right-to-Left languages

[Andy Robinson]

> After downloading reportlab toolkit, and failing to write a right-to-left
> text,
> and making a google search I found that there is no support for RTL. The
> advice given was to try AcrobatME. Unfortunately I don't have Acrobat ME,
> so I went ahead and implemented RTL support myself :)
>
> The current version is naive and incomplete, but seems to perform the
> basic functions.

>
> Current implementation is based on reportlab version 1.15. It
> uses 'fribidi'
> library to perform unicode bidirectional algorithm, which I wrapped for
> python access. Currently I tried to make as litle modifications
> as possible
> to RL code, mostly factoring out some operations to allow overriding them.
>
> Hope there is interest integrating it in the mainstream toolkit,
> Ury

 I am VERY interested in this.  Thanks, Ury!  Can you send over
some code?  Also, since you do not use ME, I presume you
are embedding fonts?  TrueType or Type 1? We'll need to know where
to get hold of an appropriate font and to make some kind of reproducible
test script.  I would be delighted to make a checkin, even if we label it
as 'experimental', so we and others can use it.

You will have to be patient with us as me and my team can't read
any right-to-left languages.  However, FriBiDi (which I had never heard
of before tonight) has some really good docs and links to them:
  http://fribidi.sourceforge.net/
  http://www.langbox.com/bidimozilla/BiDi_API.html

Best Regards,

Andy Robinson

p.s. do all Israelis start coding at midnight?  The Twisted Matrix team
usually get busy about now too...