[reportlab-users] czech characters

[Andy Robinson]

> Is it true that ReportLab does not support iso-8859-2 ?

The accurate statement is that ReportLab has nothing to
do with encodings.  You must give it input in the same encoding
as the fonts the PDF will be viewed with.

The problem is that Acrobat Reader (up to v5 at least) does not 
contain ISO-8859-2 characters.  It ships with 14 standard
fonts containing ISO-8859-1 glyphs (and a few more for the
Macintosh).  So even if we required Unicode input everywhere, all 
the people with a non-CE Acrobat Reader would see garbage until 
they downloaded the right font packs.  

The other approach, which makes bigger files and is slower, is 
to always use TrueType fonts, give it UTF-8 inputand it will embed 
the characters in the file.  

I would really like it if some other people could do a few experiments
about making this easier (e.g. assemble fonts and registration
scripts and upload them), as we don't really have the time or the 
language skills, and this is what Open Source is supposed to be good
for!

thanks,

Andy