[reportlab-users] Cursive Font Question

[Henning von Bargen]

I don't know if that helps you, 
because I've never tested it with anything else but german text
(plain ol' left-to-right), but wordaxe (http://deco-cow.sourceforge.net)
contains a
replacement for the reportlab.platypus.paragraph.Paragraph class
that supports kerning for TrueType fonts.

Perhaps you can look at the source code and extract the kerning
functions to create your own (low-level) functions for stringwidth
and text output with kerning support.

Unfortunately, it's more or less impossible to create an 
inherited class from ReportLab's Paragraph class, since many
functions are _xxxx in the module, not in the class.

But you may be able to make a copy of the paragraph.py file
under a different name and try to modify the stringwidth function
in there.

Take a look at the kerning_formatText and kerning_textOut functions
in the NewParagraph.py file and the function stringWidth_kerning
int the kerning_info.py file.

Of course I'd like it best if you'd try out wordaxe and if it doesn't
work for arabic (right-to-left) text, extend it somehow...

Henning

P.S.
If you add code to your message, please do not use anything
but ASCII characters - use the \uXXXX notation for anything else
(see http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html#unicode-literals-in-python-source-code).
Otherwise other people cannot run your code.
Here's what I see in your code:

text= u"??? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ???????"


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

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"??? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ???????"

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