[reportlab-users] Incorrect character composition

[Andy Robinson]

I guess if anyone is to blame for this, it's me as ReportLab's founder.

The closest we got to even half-understanding the problem was about 6
years ago when an Arabic-speaking employee with a little knowledge of
Farsi took a look.  Unfortunately we are not rendering raster graphics
on screen.  We are trying to work out the right font descriptors and
sequences of bytes to put in the PDF file so that the right stuff
magically happens on screen.   When I did that with Japanese in about
2002-2003, with the advantages that (a) I can read and write the
language and (b) there is no special layout at all, it still took a
month of reverse-engineering other peoples' PDFs.    Not knowing any
of these languages, it's probably a big job, and we have not had any
volunteers from the open source community, nor any customers willing
to pay for the R&D.

I don't think it's a performance issue like kerning.  I would
sincerely hope that one just has to put the right byte sequences into
the PDF and that the font sorts it out for you.

If anyone here is willing to help have a crack at it, stick their
hands up and I can suggest a general approach.   We have done some
work in the past month updating the pyfribidi extension to compile on
Python 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4, whch is a prerequisite for anything here.  I
think we probably need to crack Arabic and Hebrew as a first step.

- Andy