[reportlab-users] Unicode support

[Robin Becker]

Eric Hochmeister wrote:
> Hi Robin,
> 
> I will take a look at the version2 code.
> 
> My main concern is, in version 2, will I be able to use unicode
> strings throughout and not worry about fonts etc?  Will all of this be
> transparent to the end user/developer?
> 
> I'm looking for the ability to just use platypus by sending it unicode
> strings and having a PDF output containing the final result.  There is
> no need for right to left paragraphs (for asian languages) currently,
> but merely for European characters etc.
> 
> Any information you could provide would be greatlly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:55:36 +0000, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> wrote:
> 
>>bo at bitute.b4net.lt wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 03:12:20PM -0500, Eric Hochmeister wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>So ReportLab does not support unicode at all?  I've seen examples on
>>>>the website where reports were being generated for Japanese Medical
>>>>Reporting.
>>>>
>>>>Am I mistaken on this issue?  Can anyone clarify on this??
>>>
>>>
>>>Ah, sure you can get output with TTF/UTF-8 if you do unicode(foo, 'utf-8'), but
>>>justifincation still does not works. Means, that UTF output you CAN get. The
>>>only problem that unicode does not supported in general: AFAIK, there are no
>>>unicode strings inside the code. In PLATYPUS justification will not work, for
>>>example.
>>>
>>>Good news: I heard (but not sure), that Unicode is supported in the CVS snapshot. ;-)
>>>
>>>Robin?
>>>
>>
...... I'm not the expert on this, but I think there are some extra tests which 
purport to test this. The real problem is that the base fonts aren't unicode 
aware and we're still discussing how to deal with them wrt exception handling eg 
when a greek comes in we need to trap and handle that sort of thing.
-- 
Robin Becker