[reportlab-users] Fonts with missing glyphs

[Roberto Alsina]

On Thursday 25 September 2008 18:16:25 Andy Robinson wrote:

> 2008/9/25 Roberto Alsina <ralsina at netmanagers.com.ar>:

> > >From a rst2pdf user's request:

> >

> > Sometimes a glyph is not available in a specific font. For example,

> > unicode box drawing characters are not in Courier. Is there a way

> > reportlab could give a warning if it's being asked to draw a glyph in a

> > font that doesn't have it?

>

> We thought about this, and even looked at situations where we

> invisibly 'switch font' on the fly.  I see 2 problems

>

> (1) string-drawing is key to perforrmance.  Checking every drawString

> call might be slower, unless we increased our dependency

> on C.    (It would be cheaper to check when the document is saved, or

> keep a set of characters seen in each font, so at least we could warn

> people).

>

> (2) worse, we don't actually know what's in YOUR copy of Courier.

> That's a feature of the version of Adobe Reader, or its competitors,

> which you use to view the PDF.  I've seen files with, say, Serbo-Croat

> accents which are readable in a Bosnian version of Adobe Reader, but

> show as black blobs in a US English one.  Same file, same (alleged)

> font.   Now we have moved to unicode input, we have to assume all

> characters are valid input.  (It would have been easier prior to 2.0

> when we often knew the character set of the font).


Ok, then, marked as "not a real bug".

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