[reportlab-users] Problem printing with lulu.com

[Robin Becker]

On 14/04/2010 13:26, Andy Robinson wrote:

> We've decided on a couple of changes here.

>

> - those people printing in environments where all fonts should be

> embedded should have a way to register not only a base font but also a

> font family (as we need bold and italic) on startup

> - getSampleStyleSheet() can then use this

> - anything else needing a default font will take it from the config

>

> Hopefully this will eliminate stray occurrences of Helvetica and

> Times-Roman, and still make it easy enough to get a usable stylesheet

> without making a copy of it.

>

> Robin will post the list when this is in place

>

> - Andy

........

OK I have made some changes to reportlab/lib/styles.py and tables.py (the main 
culprit) so that for the canvas the standard fonts will all be derived from the 
canvas_basefontname variable in rl_config.py. If you use one of the 'standard' 
font names such as Courier, Helvetica or Times-Roman then a font family will 
automagically appear in the sample stylesheet. Also there will be variables 
called reportlab.lib.styles._baseFontName, _baseFontNameB, _baseFontNameI & 
_baseFontNameBI which can be explicitly imported.

If you decide to use another font name then you will have to explicitly register 
suitable font(s) and also do a registerFontFamily eg

from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics, ttfonts
pdfmetrics.registerFont(ttfonts.TTFont("Vera", "Vera.ttf"))
pdfmetrics.registerFont(ttfonts.TTFont("VeraBd", "VeraBd.ttf"))
pdfmetrics.registerFont(ttfonts.TTFont("VeraIt", "VeraIt.ttf"))
pdfmetrics.registerFont(ttfonts.TTFont("VeraBI", "VeraBI.ttf"))
pdfmetrics.registerFontFamily('Vera',normal='Vera',
	bold='VeraBd',italic='VeraIt',boldItalic='VeraBI')

this will need to be done prior to creating a canvas or getting the style sheet 
etc etc (ie early in the process).

I've tested Robert's script with this latest code and thankfully we do get rid 
of Times-Roman in favour of Vera etc etc.


The same kind of logic has been applied to the graphics base font 
(rl_config.defaultGraphicsFontName) a bit more thoroughly although for now that 
stays defaulted to 'Times-Roman'. Charts are more sensitive to font size so it's 
probably unwise to change to Helvetica.
-- 
Robin Becker