[reportlab-users] Problem with <sub> and Ghostscript.

Andy Robinson reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Wed, 23 Apr 2003 00:38:30 +0100


> Then it will be rendered like this:
> H
>   2O
> instead of
> H O
>  2
> 
> The PDF looks correct in Acrobat Reader.
> 
> Is this a problem of reportlab or ghostscript?

I suspect the latter.  The position of the </sub> tag
is pretty clear :-)  Also, the sub script actually embeds
a special PDF state operator rather than moving stuff up
or down, and it's easy to imagine a renderer getting that
wrong.  Our base line target is (a) display OK in Acrobat Reader,
(b) export to Postcript, go through Distiller and still display
OK in Acrobat Reader.  

> 
> Perhaps there is an easier solution for rendering formatted text 
> to images?
> My first idea was to use RenderPM,
> but I don't know how to draw into an image using platypus.

Sadly, the graphics submodule is a different model to
the canvas.  That's something I'd love to fix in version 2
one day.  You can currently do simple multiline strings
into a bitmap but not paragraphs.

- Andy