[reportlab-users] Font mappings, encodings, Macs - r1.20

[Andy Robinson]

People keep asking about problems registering Arial.
After release 1.19 we fixed this problem by deleting
a lot of spurious family-mappings from 
reportlab/pdfbase/_fontdata.py.  The ONLY families it
declares are Helvetica, Courier and Times-Roman which
are the built-in fonts.  So, if this is biting you,
get the daily snapshot or pull that one file from
CVS.

We have come to the end of a large and frantic wave of
projects and have a bit more time next month. We are 
hoping to do a release 1.20 in June.  Key topics
are likely to be
(a) unify font registration better, so families are
created on the fly and TrueType and Postscript handled in
a more uniform way.
(b) allow an optional 'autoConvertEncoding' mode so that
- the canvas has a declared encoding,
- each font has a declared encoding
- it converts if needed.
(c) ensure the correct input to various Image objects and
functions is at least documented in the user guide, and
'fixed' if anything really is broken.

(b) would be big, The Right Thing, but a great way to break
existing apps. So, we would make it an optional mode
for at least one release cycle.  We would initially try
to make sure utf-8 and latin-1 input always did as expected
irrespective of whether you are

Any other wish list items on fonts and encodings? 
If the Mac people want to send concrete patches, we're happy
to try them; we don't know about Macs but at least have one,
so if you make a problem and a solution transparent to us,
we'll work it in :-)

Best Regards,



Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Europe Ltd.
mobile +44-7976-355742
office +44-20-8544-8049