[reportlab-users] Incorrect character composition

[Robin Becker]

On 20/04/2015 11:54, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> On 4/20/2015 2:20 AM, Robin Becker wrote:
>..........
>>
>> 1) try an experiment to see if PDF renderers will accept the GPOS information
>> in a specific font and make good use of it. I guess we can use illustrator or
>> equivalent to make a sample document. Examining the dejaVuSans font shows it
>> certainly has GPOS information.
>
> Maybe. The attempt will also be instructive regarding how Illustrator might
> handle such combined characters... if it does (I don't have Illustrator to test
> with, but since it is from Adobe, it well might)... and what the generated PDF
> looks like... if it contains positioning instructions, or depends on the PDF
> display tools to have a good renderer.
>
>

well unfortunately the illustrator test produced exactly the wrong results; I 
copied the text from my sample DejaVuSans output into an illustrator text box 
with font set at dejavusans book. Illustrator or the copy and paste did exactly 
the wrong thing and converted only those pairs that are in the font already.

I also tried the effect of hand typing an A and then selecting a diacritic from 
illustrator's text/glyph window. The characters were sort of composed in the 
input window, but they were not well displayed and looked the same in a saved 
PDF. Our own output actually looked better for this case.

Result indecisive. I will have to do further work to test the actual embedded 
font to see if it contains gpos info.
-- 
Robin Becker