[reportlab-users] Newbie - platypus or not?

[Andy Robinson]

> Of course, as soon as you do this, you'll have to deal with someone who
> uses their middle name in all correspondance, or who insists on having
> their middle initial used, or needs the "Sr." or "Jr." suffix, etc. 
> Names are a pain in the rear.

That's nothing. 10 years ago I worked for a company in Japan which had 
allowed certain fussy customers to pick their own custom glyphs.  Yes, 
the secretaries had actually got a glyph editor and implemented various 
custom characters to faithfully mimic the pretentious-handwriting-swirls 
for about 10% of the customers on the old PC system. And they got very 
upset when these random code points came out as dots in the new 
reporting system ;-)

More seriously, you might want to consider implementing the name as a 
centered paragraph, with an algorithm which 'shrinks the font' and calls 
'wrap' repeatedly until the name-paragraph fits.  That way people with 
names like "Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes OBE" will get what 
the right info, albeit smaller.  "Shrink to fit" is a better situation 
for extremes of data than "Traceback" or "Mess..."

- Andy