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

[Rajeev Joseph Sebastian]

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 13:49, Robin Becker wrote:
> Rajeev Joseph Sebastian wrote:
> ......
>
> >>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.
>
> There are no otf specific features, but there are .ttf specific
> features. I have used .otf fonts with ttfonts.py and they have worked
> well. The .ttf implementation was contributed so actual compliance with
> otf will need some work. On the other hand many of the so called ttf
> fonts on my pc fail miserably with our code as they lack some expected
> information which we attempt to read.
I'm sure the TTF implementation can read OTF (more like TrueType Open ... or 
whatever they call it these days :) ). My point is, there are OTF specific 
tables which allow for instance shaping of complex texts, and also certain 
texts with special latin characters and combining marks. This would require a 
good amount of *additions* to the TTF implementation.

Also, to conform with Unicode (rather, expectations of Unicode 
implementations), one would need a segment-er, and line breaker. These would 
probably change the paragraph layout code in RL.

Doubtless, there are countless "bad" TTF/OTF fonts for some definition of 
"bad" :)
-- 
Regards,
Rajeev J Sebastian

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