[reportlab-users] speeding up parse_utf8?

[Andy Robinson]

> When I did my initial TTF prototyping, I used Unicode string objects and
> had no problems with that (except that the XML parser used by Platypus
> did not support unicode strings and required encoding to UTF-8 and then
> decoding back to Unicode in a couple of places in the code).  Python 1.5
> compatibility was the only reason I redid it with 8-bit UTF-8 strings.
> 

That's what I suspected.  We should use codecs.

Since 1.18 was the last version to officially support 1.5.2, I suggest
we stick an assertion in reportlab/__init__.py saying "2.1 or higher
needed", then import the codecs package where needed.  Unless 1000 users
tell me now they are on 2.0 :-)

- Andy