[reportlab-users] Character Encoding

[Uli Schrempp]

Hi Tim!

Thanks for your reply. Taking the windows arial-font solved the problem. 
My the encoding mechanism is correct. I get a utf-8-encoded string with 
greek letters and want to transform it into an iso8859-7-encoded string.

I just changed the font and everything worked fine.

BR uli

Tim Roberts schrieb:
> On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:09:51 +0200, Uli Schrempp <schrempp at syslab.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> I'm trying to write an ISO 8859-7 (greek letters) string into a PDF 
>> like this:
>>     text = unicode(greek_letters, 'utf-8').encode('iso8859-7')
>>     myCanvas.setFont('helvetica', 16)
>>     myCanvas.drawCentred String( x, y, text)
>>
>> But I get no greek letters written ...
>> What have I to improove?
>>  
>>
> 
> Two problems.  First, I suspect you have an encoding problem here.  What 
> that code says is that "greek_letters" is a string in UTF-8, which you 
> then convert to ISO8859-7 and send to ReportLab.  However, ReportLab 
> doesn't understand ISO8859-7 -- it understands UTF-8.  What IS the 
> variable "greek letters"?  Is it actually an ISO8859-7 string?  If so, 
> you want this:
> 
>    text = greek_letters.decode('iso8859-7').encode('utf-8')
> 
> Convert the ISO8859-7 to Unicode, then convert the Unicode to UTF-8.
> 
> Second, I'm not sure the Poscscript fonts (like Helvetica) understand 
> UTF-8 at all, and I don't think they have any Greek characters.  UTF-8 
> certainly works with TrueType fonts.  I just tried this, and it worked:
> 
>    pdfmetric.registerFont( TTFont( 'Arial1', 'arial.ttf') )
>    u = u"\N{greek capital letter delta}\N{greek capital letter gamma}"
>    u1 = u.encode('utf-8')
>    c.setFont( 'Arial1', 36 )
>    c.drawString( 80, 600, u1 )
> 

-- 
Ulrich Schrempp
schrempp at syslab.com, SYSLAB.COM GmbH, Bonner Platz 1, 80803 München
Tel: +49 89 3063589-0, Fax: +49 89 3063589-9, http://www.syslab.com