[Spam] [reportlab-users] RE: Visual editor: what are the objectives?

[Rajeev Joseph Sebastian]

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 03:35, Andy Robinson wrote:
> > We are starting our project for Visual editor (well, more like IDE rather
> > than a drawing software), for RL. However, it would diverge from the
> > recommendations above because we are writing it in PyQt/Qt-C++. So it
> > would be good to know some of your ideas, since you work so closely with
> > the code from day to day. I think, the ideas are cross-toolkit unlike
> > whatever people may feel about the GUI-toolkit :)
>
> Well, if you are promising a plural number of developers, it sounds
> like your resources outweigh anything else said so far - none of us
> at ReportLab are really proficient in any Python GUI tool.

No, I'm really sorry if the "we" caused this misunderstanding: "we" are just 
two, but we have very good experience with PyQt (we are using it under GPL 
license by the way).

>
> AsI think I said my main concern is installability.
>
> > Basically, we have divided the task into 2 parts based on the current
> > organization of RL architecture viz., a page template designer, and a
> > story designer.
> >
> > The page template designer, is of course quite generic. The story
> > designer would support multiple editors for each type of object, e.g.,
> > Tables would have their own editor, so would Charts, Graphs and so on.
>
> Yes, that's exactly what I always wanted to build.  (Are you guys
> available for a conference call some time so we could exchange ideas
> more quickly?  I could call up tomorrow or any time this week.  Let me
> know by private email)
If the constraint on "we" mentioned above is OK by you, then yes, we are 
available for discussions (the particular mode though, might be difficult to 
co-ordinate due to timezone issues).

>
> You mention Unicode.  We have a UTF8 branch which is nearly working -
> the only remaining major issue was the Asian font pack support which
> I have not finished, but it's pretty solid.  


Yes, Robin Becker once told me about the utf-8 branch. However, a quick once 
over of the code did not reveal any OTF specific features  As you may know, a 
proper Unicode text implementation is much more than simply using UTF-8 
encoding format. It causes much changes to the text rendering system as well 
(it depends on your perspective whether these changes are useful to your 
business or not). Though it is not an enormous task given the excellent 
organization of what has already been written, it is still quite a difficult 
one.

-- 
Regards,
Rajeev J Sebastian

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