[reportlab-users] RTL Patch Committed

[Andy Robinson]

2009/11/24 Yoann Roman <yroman-reportlab at altalang.com>:

> I am getting shaping. You can see that in the PDF the script outputs.

> The unshaped code points look quite a bit different than the shaped

> version. The issue is that this legacy approach at shaping (replacing

> code points with shaped code points) does not provide full coverage for

> Arabic script languages such as Pashto.


OK, thanks for confirming that.   We'll clearly document the limitations,
hopefully with visible snippets on our site.


> In my experience, Arabic (the language) shaping seems to be fully

> covered by the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks.


Can anyone here tell us if this simple shaping is sufficient for Hebrew?

--

I had a quick look at ICU and PyICU.  Good Python support, pre-built
DLLs available.
I took a wild guess and typed....
   sudo apt-get install python-pyicu
...and that works too!

However, I am not clear how it will solve the problem.  As you said yourself,
the font engine should really be doing this.   Could it be that it depends on
the fonts themselves, and that the best commercial ones have extra info
which allows better rendering of the right pairs?


Thanks,


Andy