[reportlab-users] Hebrew Support Patch

[Hosam Aly]

Hello,


I have been reading through Moshe's patch, and I noticed a few things.


First, the code that Moshe suggested for `Canvas.drawString` should 
actually be placed at the very beginning of `PDFTextObject._formatText`, 
because that's where all string writing methods eventually go (as far as 
I understand).


Second, paragraph direction should not be associated with paragraph 
alignment. Any paragraph can be aligned left or right, and that does not 
change its direction, being LTR or RTL. So we need to have a flag that 
tells the paragraph direction, and this flag should be set by the 
caller. This is the same as what is done in HTML: you can specify 
`dir="RTL"` as an attribute on most tags, and it does not affect text 
alignment. So I suggest adding a "direction" property to 
`platypus.paragraph`, whose value by default is LTR.


Moreover, there is no need for the code in `platypus.paragraph`. It is 
sufficient to use `pyfribidi.log2vis` in `PDFTextObject._formatText` 
with automatic detection for most cases, but we should pass the 
paragraph direction to the pyfribidi function so as to get correct 
output for some corner cases (e.g. when symbols come at the end of the 
line).

I am working on supporting RTL functionality right now, and I will 
follow up with a patch very soon.


Best regards,

Hosam Aly
Software Engineer
Centrivision (http://www.centrivision.com/)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/hosamaly