[reportlab-users] Cursive Font Question

[Richie Marini]

I'm using the reportlab with pyfribidi to create pdf's with Arabic fonts. 
I'm noticing that canvas.StringWidth() returns a value larger then the 
actual rendered string which is causing me some issues.  From what I'm 
guessing this has to do with the "cursive" nature of the glyphs in that 
they overlap each other a little to make the cursive connection to the 
glyph next to it?  Therefore, string width is simply returning the 
summation of widths of all the glyphs used and not accounting for the 
overlapping.  So the value return is the width of all the Glyph's and not 
the amount of space the entire string is taking up on the canvas. 
So, if I were to render two separate words on a canvas with two separate 
calls to render and increment the X value by the stringWidth() of the 
first string I get a large white space between the two because the width 
returned is to big. For example:

### START ###
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont

pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Arabic', '/Library/fonts/Arial 
Unicode.ttf'))

c= canvas.Canvas(filename= "test.pdf")

x= 10
y= 500
text= u"هذا هو مجرد اختبار للغة العربية"

c.setFont('Arabic', 12)

c.drawString(x, y, text)

x+= c.stringWidth(text)

c.drawString(x, y, text)

c.showPage()
c.save()


### END ###


Wondering if there's a least a way to get the summed value of the 
overlapped glyph's so I can at least substract that value from that 
returned from stringWidth()? Or maybe, it's a different problem all 
together?

  Thanks,
-richie