[reportlab-users] RTL Patch Committed

[Andy Robinson]

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

> Based on what I've read, it seems Pango can do this glyph selection

> given the text and font. I just haven't confirmed this or if there's a

> way to get the information back out in a usable form to RL.


I am not even sure we would have a use for the info.  When making PDF,
we do not render text at all; we just pass a string to the PDF
'textout' operator, which is stored in the PDF and then somehow
rendered on someone else's monitor later.  So we're at someone else's
mercy about how it all looks in the end (Adobe? MS/Apple/Gnome?)

When I have time and have learned to recognise some phrases, I'll get
back to absolute basics:   make up a 'hello world' phrase in Farsi or
Pashto as Postscript, run it through Acrobat Distiller, and see what
kind of PDF comes out of it.  If it looks right from the glyph
selection viewpoint, then we can look at what kind of font
declarations need to go with it.

We also have to think of our non-PDF output.  When making bitmap
charts, we currently use libart under the hood, and we have extra bits
of code to extract and pass curves to it from FreeType.    Probably
all of this needs 'modernising' for ReportLab 3000 to use fully
Unicode-aware rendering tools.


-- 
Andy