[reportlab-users] Hebrew Support Patch

[Andy Robinson]

2009/11/17 Hosam Aly <haly at centrivision.com>:

> Hello,

> So I suggest

> adding a "direction" property to `platypus.paragraph`, whose value by

> default is LTR.


This makes a lot of sense to me but I'd like to consider one change.

We introduced a 'wordwrap' property into Platypus and RML a few years
back for Asian text support.   Default value is None. but 'CJK' (for
Asian text) is allowed and selects a different word-wrapping
algorithm.  This is heavily used - we generate tend of thousands of
pages of Japanese per day.

Would it work if we extended this to have
  wordwrap = None | CJK | RTL

?

(There are probably a few other weird ones, but we have no short-term
plans to support Mayan writing in concentric circles etc...and in the
long run, ReportLab 3 should just look at the Unicode code points and
figure out that it's Arabic/Hebrew or CJKV)

Opinions welcome from anyone.



> I am working on supporting RTL functionality right now, and I will follow up

> with a patch very soon.


That's great news and we welcome your input, as well as Yoann's.
We're now hoping to do a release in Dec or early Jan (yes, I know it
keeps slipping, but you'll shortly see some of the things which pushed
it back) and it would be great to have some of this in.  We also now
have an Arabic-speaking employee which will help us a lot.

I tried to play with this a while ago but could not get fribidi and/or
pyfribidi to work due to confusions over versions. If anyone could
post some precise instructions on exactly what to install (e.g. Ubuntu
packages, or precise source) that would help us get into this.

Best Regards,

-- 
Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab