[reportlab-users] Using accented chars with TTF?

Marius Gedminas reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Tue, 10 Sep 2002 09:22:20 +0200


Hi,

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 08:53:51AM +0200, Dinu Gherman wrote:
> I'm trying to use TTF fonts with Platypus where I found a little
> surprise: I can see accented characters after converting my text
> input to UTF-8, but these are prefixed by the logical NOT charac-
> ter. See attached PDF sample and generator file. Can anybody ex-
> plain this, or, even better, suggest how to get rid of them?

That would be the case if you fed UTF-8 text to a traditional Reportlab
font which expects an 8-bit encoding.

> # rinatest1.py
> 
> from reportlab.lib.styles import ParagraphStyle
> from reportlab.lib.fonts import addMapping
> from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
> from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont
> from reportlab.platypus.doctemplate import SimpleDocTemplate
> from reportlab.platypus.paragraph import Paragraph
> 
> pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Rina', 'Rina.ttf'))
> for i in (0, 1):
>     for j in (0, 1):
>         addMapping('Rina', i, j, 'Rina')

(Is that allowed now?  I used to get errors when I tried to map normal
and bold versions into the same PS font.)

> def latin1toUtf8(s):
>     return unicode(s, "iso-8859-1").encode("utf-8")
> 
> normal = ParagraphStyle('normal')

Insert

  normal.fontName = 'Rina'

here to prevent that.

> p = Paragraph(latin1toUtf8('Andr�'), normal)

This is not Latin-1.  Characters in range 0x80-0x9F are non-printable
there.  This is probably Mac-Roman?  If so, you should use something
like

  p = Paragraph(mac2utf8('Andr\216'), normal)

where mac2utf8 is defined as

  def mac2utf8(s):
      return unicode(s, "Mac-Roman").encode("utf-8")

> SimpleDocTemplate('Andre.pdf').build([p])

(And this time I actually tested that my solution works ;)

Regards,
Marius Gedminas
-- 
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