[reportlab-users] V2 bullet

[Mike Dewhirst]

John

Thank you very much. I read and absorbed all that. Much clearer now and 
I have resolved my problem.

Thanks

Mike

John J. Lee wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Mike Dewhirst wrote:
> [...]
>> Prof Google led me up many dark and twisty alleys and that led me to 
>> think I'm not really sure I want to allocate brain space to the 
>> innards of unicode. But I do want to be able translate various symbols 
>> in various to codes which I then want to make Python emit.
>>
>> Can you suggest any links or directions to reading matter for people 
>> (ie me) with short attention spans?
> 
> There's a certain minimum you should really know, which is not difficult 
> to get your head around.  You need to know what a codepoint is, and what 
> an encoding is, for example.  Here's a good primer:
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
> 
> 
> Then you need to know how that applies to Python:
> 
> http://effbot.org/zone/unicode-objects.htm
> 
> 
> When you've absorbed that, rummage through the unicode code charts to 
> find either the codepoint for the character you want, or the long 
> "friendly name" of the character (you can also use Windows' "Character 
> Map" utility):
> 
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/
> 
> 
> Then, to include that character in a Python string, either use one of 
> the unicode string escapes to type in the character, or encode the 
> codepoint to the encoding you're using (e.g. UTF-8).  e.g. let's say I 
> want the character R with a circle around it (the registered trademark 
> sign).  The codepoint for that is 174 (or AE in hexadecimal).  Here's 
> several different ways of writing that, first as a Python unicode string 
> object (all these mean the same thing):
> 
> u"\N{Registered Sign} ReportLab Europe Ltd."
> u'\xae ReportLab Europe Ltd.'
> u'\u00ae ReportLab Europe Ltd.'
> u'\U000000ae ReportLab Europe Ltd.'
> 
> 
> The first uses the "friendly name" I mentioned above, the others use the 
> codepoint.
> 
> Or you can write it as a regular string object encoded in UTF-8:
> 
> '\xc2\xae ReportLab Europe Ltd.'
> 
> 
> How did I get the \xc2\xae at the start of that last example?  I just 
> used Python to encode to UTF-8 from a unicode string I typed in:
> 
>>>> u"\N{Registered Sign}".encode("utf-8")
> '\xc2\xae'
> 
> 
> Here's the Python docs on these escape codes:
> 
> http://docs.python.org/ref/strings.html
> 
> 
>> If not, I'll settle for dark and twisty stuff :)
> 
> There's lots of dark and twisty stuff about collation, normalisation, 
> etc. etc. etc., but most people get away with ignoring it all ;-)
> 
> 
> John
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