[reportlab-users] Small improvements of z3c.rml

[Stephan Richter]

On Tuesday 05 June 2007 10:00, Yuan HOng wrote:

> I just discovered z3c.rml for my project and find it a great product.


That's great to hear!


> In using it in my project, I made the following improvements to your

> code, and hope this will be useful for others.

>

> 1. I am creating Chinese PDF documents. The normal TTF for Chinese

> printing is 'simsun'. However, when we want to have bold in text, we

> switch to 'simhei'. To properly registered this, we need

> reportlab.lib.fonts.addMapping function. This is missing in the

> reportlab RML specification, and I added the directive as:

>

> <addMapping faceName="simsun" bold="1" italic="0" psName="simhei" />


Great. Could you create a small sample RML file demonstrating this feature? 
This way the tag will be documented and tested at the same time. Please also 
send me a rendered version. See z3c/rml/tests[input|expected].


> 2. Chinese and some other Asian text does not use space as word

> separator, so the default paragraph wrapping doesn't work for them. To

> correct this, reportlab 2.0 introduced the 'wordWrap' attribute to

> 'para' and 'paraStyle' directive. When set to 'CJK', it will cause the

> CJK wrapping algorithm to be used.


Yep, sounds good. Please create a small sample RML file demonstrating the 
feature. 


> 3. I can't find a way to left align the whole table in a frame.

> Reading the reportlab user guide I find the following:

>

> All flowables have an hAlign property: ('LEFT', 'RIGHT', 'CENTER' or

> 'CENTRE'). For

> paragraphs, which fill the full width of the frame, this has no

> effect. For tables, images or other objects which

> are less than the width of the frame, this determines their horizontal

> placement.

>

> So a <blockTable> should also support the 'alignment' attribute, just

> like a <para>. I added this, and it worked.


Great.


> Attached please find the svn diff output of my modifications against

> the current SVN trunk.


Cool.

I am very excited to hear that someone is using z3c.rml to produce Chinese 
PDFs. Once you send me a couple sample.test RML/PDF files, I will check all 
your changes into the trunk. It would be also cool to get a non-minimal 
sample document from you, so we can show-off the Chinese language support!


> By the way, is <pageNumber> and other sequence tags working? I can't

> get them working.


No, I have not put any thought into how to correctly implement them. If you 
want to take a stab at it, please feel free to do so.

Thanks a lot for your feedback and contribution!

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training