[reportlab-users] ReportLab vs LaTex

[François Pinard]

[Tim Roberts]


>The primary focus of TeX and LaTeX is beauty.


Knuth discussed this particular matter at length somewhere.  The primary 
goal of typography is legibility.  When people or software mainly seek 
beauty while typesetting, they really miss the goal.

One sad example, especially sad since it came out of Unix, is the 
simultaneous left-right justification in "man" pages through "nroff", 
using fixed-width fonts.  While this is considered more beautiful than 
ragged right edge, this has been demonstrated to decrease legibility and 
slow down reading.

Now, this being said, when two typographical approaches are otherwise 
comparable at the legibility level, beauty is surely considered, as it
increases reader's comfort, and consequently, reader's resistance to 
fatigue.  But legibility is undoubtedly the primary focus.


>Each one has its place.  If I were writing a book or a research paper,

>I'd use LaTeX.  If I were creating a registration form or an inventory

>report, I'd use ReportLab.


I really think ReportLab could reuse the good from LaTeX at the basic 
typographical level.  It is extremely unusual, so for that I know, that 
ReportLab users really place each character themselves (they could 
manage inter-character or inter-word spacing, but the font still usually 
drives the width of each character).  ReportLab would not be any less 
useful if it was knowing more about ligatures and kerning.  Word 
segmentation issues are surely difficult, tricky, and language 
dependent, yet there is a good amount of knowledge about such things in 
the free software world.

Of course, someone somewhere has to volunteer doing such things, and it 
would be totally unrealistic that I propose myself, I just do not have 
enough free time.  My only point here is that it is not out of the realm 
of ReportLab, so far that I understand it, trying to recycle some 
quality ideas from TeX for the basic usage of fonts.  ReportLab would 
not be "out of his place" by doing so.

                        Have Happy Times, all! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca