[reportlab-users] Arabic support

[Andy Robinson]

Currently, we do not support Arabic or other RTL languages.

To be honest, we need a developer with a need for this, or some
ability to read the language(s), to pick this up and make it work; it
is open source, after all.  We had an Arabic-speaking developer long
ago but he moved on.  If you are able to help out that would be great.
My colleague who know the most about it, Robin Becker, is away this
week but back on 1st September and can hopefully point you the right
way.

- Andy Robinson
ReportLab


On 24 August 2015 at 15:07, Fran Boon <francisboon at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am using the currently released ReportLab (3.2.0) for PDF support
> within Sahana ( http://sahanafoundation.org )
> All has gone fine until working with Arabic...the font is fine using
> Unifont (http://unifoundry.com/pub/unifont-7.0.06/font-builds/unifont-7.0.06.ttf)
> however the characters in each word are left-to-right so it's
> nonsensical.
>
>
> I found this old post but the linked page has disappeared:
> http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2010-October/009837.html
>
>
> I found an open Ticket which suggests following up on this mailing list
> https://bitbucket.org/rptlab/reportlab/issues/31/arabic-language-not-support-in-reportlab
>
> It mentions a rtl-support patch that was being merged in...what is the
> status of that?
>
> This say that we need to use Pyfribidi:
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyfribidi/
> (Have so far been unable to install this on Windows...downloaded
> Visual C++ for Python but it doesn't find the fribidi source:properly:
> Cannot open include file: 'fribidi-config.h')
>
>
> I also found this on StackExchange:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8222517/use-of-arabic-rtl-in-reportlab
>
> This says that we can use Python-BiDi:
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-bidi
>
> This looks more promising than pyfribidi as it's pure python and easy
> to install.
> The example code given looks very straightforward too.
>
> (I confess I'm not quite sure what ArabicWriter adds on top of this:
> https://github.com/hasenj/arabic-writer/wiki)
>
>
>
> Is there a branch of ReportLab with RTL support included that I can
> test / contribute to?
> Or should I add my own support to our ReportLab routines using Python-BiDi?
>
> Thnaks a lot,
> Fran.
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