[reportlab-users] Re: Ligatures & page count, merge cells in tables

[Mark Summerfield]

On Thursday 03 June 2004 17:15, Henning von Bargen wrote:
[snip]
> > 4) Is there any auto-hyphenation?
>
> You can download my hyphenation library from
> http://deco-cow.sourceforge.net
> (an "official" announcement will follow, perhaps on Sunday).
> The library supports auto-hyphenation in RL Paragraphs.
> Documentation is still lacking and the code needs some work as well.
> But it works for me. I could generate the RL user guide with hyphenation
> support
> using english hyphenation pattern files from Open Office,
> furthermore I can auto-hyphenate german text with a self-written algorithm
> that
> works by decomposing composed words (useful for germanic languages).
>
> With auto-hyphenation, block-justified paragraphs look pretty nice.

OK, thanks.

[snip]
> One question: Why do you consider using RL for your project?
> I'm asking because I also tried using lout and LaTeX,
> but programming a nice-looking document
> based on dynamic data seems easier with RL
> and that's why I'm using RL though lout and LaTeX produce
> slightly better quality.

I don't use LaTeX because I dislike it. I use lout all the time: it
produces beautiful output and is "complete". The support for tables and
diagrams is excellent (especially valuable if you can't draw!), and you
can easily use extra fonts. But lout isn't a programming language and
this means that I often have to write tools to generate or preprocess
lout; also I need PDF output and that means converting using ghostscript
which adds another tool to the toolchain. Right now I'm working on a GUI
application that provides "school graphs", i.e. graphs on "graph paper".
It would be possible but very tedious to achieve this with lout, but
with ReportLab I can do the whole thing in one GUI program without
needing any extra tools. Of course I'm using it to produce EPS files
that I then incorporate in lout documents... but eventually I may start
creating entire documents using ReportLab (although I'm not keen to do
so without being able to have ligatures), since I'd rather just use one
tool, especially one that I can use with Python.

-- 
Mark.