[reportlab-users] Using Mac and TrueType fonts with renderPM

[Ka-Ping Yee]

Hello,

I just went through many steps and some sleuthing to figure out
how to get renderPM to properly produce a PNG image containing
strings drawn in a Macintosh font, and I'd like to contribute
my notes here.  I hope they help someone.

1.  I installed ReportLab 2.0, renderPM, and PIL.

2.  I wanted to use Lucida Grande, which is available on all
    Mac OS X systems at /System/Library/Fonts/LucidaGrande.dfont.
    But to use it with ReportLab, I needed a TTF file, and I also
    discovered that to use it with renderPM, I needed a Type 1
    font file as well.

3.  fondu, available at fondu.sf.net, will convert the .dfont
    file to a .ttf.  (Use fondu <filename>.)

4.  ttf2pt1, available at ttf2pt1.sf.net, will convert the .ttf
    file to a .pfb.  (Use ttf2pt1 -b <filename>.)

5.  Now you can create a font object and register it as usual:

    from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics, ttfonts, _fontdata
    font = ttfonts.TTFont('Lucida Grande', 'LucidaGrande.ttf')
    pdfmetrics.registerFont(font)

6.  However, this font object has no encoding vector.  To make
    it usable by renderPM, I had to stuff in an encoding vector:

    font.encoding.vector = _fontdata.encodings['StandardEncoding']

7.  renderPM will always look for the Times-Roman font, even if
    you don't use it, and will fail because you don't have the
    Type 1 files for Times-Roman.  To fix this, do:

    from reportlab.graphics import shapes, renderPM
    shapes.STATE_DEFAULTS['fontName'] = 'Lucida Grande'

8.  Now you can finally draw!

    d = shapes.Drawing()
    d.add(shapes.String(100, 100, 'Hello.', fontSize=16))
    renderPM.drawToFile(d, 'hello.png', 'PNG')

I had to look through the source of pdfmetrics, ttfonts, _fontdata,
and renderPM to figure out how to get around these problems, but
I haven't studied the code enough to submit a patch.  It looks like
steps 6 and 7 could/should be fixed in ReportLab.  Presumably the
right thing to do for 6 is to extract the encoding from the TTF,
and the right thing to do for 7 is to not attempt to look up the
Type 1 file until it's actually time to draw a string.

Hope this helps!


-- ?!ng