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

[Andy Robinson]

> 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).

Two is plural - and more than we could put to work on it ;-)  But if you
are serious about this, we'd certainly follow along and make sure we 
could build, comment and help out.

> 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.
> 



This is very much something we want to do, and any work on it will be 
useful; we really need some collaborators outside our core team,
otherwise it will only progress if we get a large customer project
which needs it.  Unfortunately, customers tend to say 'I want my 
documents to look like this', and there are usually ways to achieve that
with other font formats or explicit conversions ;-)

Report Markup Language on the utf8 branch does support utf8 input
everywhere and does the right things, except with the Asian language
support.  The remaining tough spots, as I remember, are
(a) using .otf font files
(b) properly encoding output to work with Adobe's Asian font packs
(easy, just have not done it yet)
(c) being able to render the glyphs in renderPM for all supported font
types and with correct encoding (we do a lot of bitmap chart output).


Right now I am in the middle of a couple of project proposals, either of 
which would require robust Japanese output and paragraph wrapping 
algorithms in Q1/Q2. Either of these would give a big impetus to push 
forwards with a Unicode branch.    I'm not volunteering to do bidi
Arabic/Hebrew text personally though  ;-)

Best Regards,


Andy