[reportlab-users] Re: warnOnMissingFontGlyphs does not work?

[gabor]

Tim Roberts wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:24:42 +0200, G?bor Farkas <gabor at nekomancer.net>
> wrote:
> 
>> i have a simple script, like this:
>>
>> ==============================================================
>> import reportlab.rl_config
>> reportlab.rl_config.warnOnMissingFontGlyphs = 1
>>from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
>>from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont
>>from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
>> pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('arial', 'arial.ttf'))
>> c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf")
>> c.setFont('arial', 32)
>> c.drawString(10, 150, "some text with missing glyphs")
>> c.showPage()
>> c.save()
>> ===============================================================
>>
>> (the text contains some japanese characters that are not in arial.ttf)
>>  
>>
> 
> How did you write them?  You haven't specified an encoding in this file,
> so unless your default code page includes Japanese, there is no way you
> could have written Japanese characters in an 8-bit string.

hi, thanks for your response..

actually the file started with
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

so it was simple to use utf8 encoded characters in the string.

btw. please note, that even without the coding-specifier, i could have 
simply used escape sequences.
this '\xe6\x97\xa5\xe6\x9c\xac\xe8\xaa\x9e' for example is nihongo in utf8.


> 
>> i assumed that i get a warning, or an exception, but nothing.
>> the script finished without problems,
>> but in the pdf file (of course), there were only the usual rectangles in 
>> the place of the missing glyphs.
>>
>> could you please tell me what am i doing wrong?
>>  
>>
> 
> Unfortunately, that's not the purpose of warnOnMissingFontGlyphs.  All
> that it does is enable an error if the font does not contain glyphs for
> all of the characters in the current encoding.  It doesn't actually
> check each character of each string.

i see..

> 
>> also, is there a way to specify more fonts, and somehow combine them so 
>> that reportlab picks the needed glyph from them? i mean, so that for 
>> example, arial.ttf will be the default, but when a glyph is missing, he 
>> takes it from kochi-mincho.ttf.
>>
> 
> No, that would be unpredictable, which is never a good thing with PDF. 
> The whole point is to get precise and predictable output.  However,
> Mincho contains all of the glyphs in Arial.  They aren't as pretty, but
> you couldn't just use Mincho for everything.

i'm sorry but i don't agree. what do you mean by unpredictable?
i simply would define a list of truetype files, and reportLab would fall 
back to the next font file in case of missing characters. afaik all the 
browsers do this.


thanks,
gabor