[reportlab-users] Using bold and italic with a generic TTF

[Lorenzo Mancini]

Hello Tim,

thanks for the quick reply.


>> That seemed to make sense, until I noticed that using that same font

>> within OpenOffice, I can actually export to PDF with bold and italic

>> characters from it (I've tried with Turkish and Korean text too, obviously).



> It would be interesting to look at the PostScript, to see what

> OpenOffice generates.


I'm attaching the OpenOffice generated PDF file, containing the same
Korean and Turkish text you found in my little script. I applied italic,
bold and bold-italic styles.

I'm seeing the result with Acrobat Reader 6.0 under Windows and xpdf
under Linux.

(with xpdf, the output is a little weird, e.g. the bold "ı" in "sınav"
gets a little white centered vertical line).



>> one: is a trick similar to OO's in the works for Reportlab, to obtain

>> bold and italic glyphs even if the currently used TTF only has regular ones?



> It is important to remember that ReportLab doesn't actually do any

> rendering.  ReportLab is generating instructions in the PostScript

> computer language.  Somewhere, there will be a PostScript interpreter

> (usually in the printer) that interprets the PostScript and produces

> output.  There is very little that ReportLab can do about this, unless

> we can reverse engineer something from the OpenOffice output.


That makes sense. For the time being, I'll try to find a TTF which
contains the italic and bold glyphs I'm looking for.

Anyway it'd be nice to find out what tricks OpenOffice uses, and maybe
add such features in Reportlab. One could even hope not to get lost, and
take a look at OpenOffice's sources.

-- 
Lorenzo Mancini
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