[reportlab-users] fixing bugs in 2.2 / Hyphenation support

[Dinu Gherman]

henning.vonbargen at arcor.de:


> [...] Wow, this is probably my longest posting ever!


Congratulations (birthday included ;-) for this very comprehensive
message!

Having followed Henning's work over the years (no joke) on adding
hyphenation support to RL I feel like adding a couple of comments
to his excellent posting.

For me the lack of proper hyphenation support was a show-stopper
for several real-life projects. Maybe this is hard to understand
for people who learned English as their first language and who do
not know or use other languages like French and especially German
with its long word compositions, e.g. the famous Donau-dampf-
schiff-fahrts-kapitäns-tochter. Anyway, I was always surprised
to see RL pay so little attention to this issue, because even
with the simplest two-colum layout your French/German text will,
most likely, look plain ugly.

So I helped Henning with his wordaxe providing mainly debugging
examples and it turned out to be a life saver. So I'd really like
to see his work being included into RL 2.2 to make it easier to
use.

Previously I had no hope for this to happen, so I started my own
reimplementation of paragraphs with their own hyphenation method
plus many other (still experimental) features like marginal text,
versal characters, line numbers, highlighting, inline bitmap and
vector graphics, etc. This is by no means "finished", but I rein-
vite people to have a look at it:

   http://www.dinu-gherman.net/tmp/alterparagraphs-0.2.0.tar.gz
   http://www.dinu-gherman.net/tmp/alterparagraphs-README.html	
   http://www.dinu-gherman.net/tmp/alterparagraphs-slides.pdf

And even if RL 2.2 will include Henning's work I will continue to
work on these alternative paragraphs, because their main purpose
is to make it easier to add new features to them. If anybody
wants to join, please let me know.

Regards,

Dinu