[reportlab-users] vertically centered text

[Andy Robinson]

On 29/01/2008, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> wrote:

> > I don't happen to have Acrobat Reader <=5 installed here, so I placed

> > the Type1 fonts in the fonts directory of the reportlab package. Is

> > there anything better I can do? I'm wondering, what was the "ready

> > answer" that Andy had for me?


I don't know either, it was 2 years back, but here's the problem.

We do not feel comfortable redistributing Adobe's metrics or font
files within our own open source distribution, as we haven't a clue
what permissions or license text would be needed.  (They are available
in a separate file)

We also don't feel comfortable including non-Adobe files, as they are
supposed to be the 'Standard 14' files and it would be equally wrong
to include some other fonts which look roughly like
Helvetica/Times/Courier but may have subtly different shapes and
metrics.

PDF is now moving towards always embedding font files, rather than
just assuming they are present in the reader.  This is part of the
PDF/A specification to make sure they can still be opened in 50 years
time and look the same.  So, the answer will be for us to include a
standard set of open source fonts in our distro, use only those in our
test cases (thus ensuring you have the same fonts for bitmaps and
PDFs), and tell people clearly they are not 'genuine Adobe Helvetica'
or whatever.  This is likely to happen in a release later this year.

Best Regards,


Andy Robinson