[reportlab-users] Chinese Custom Glyphs

[Daniel Casper]

Andy,

What you describe sounds similar to, but quite exactly what I'm up
against.  The users of our software are often using it as a legacy bridge
to babysit aging mainframe systems.  These older systems are using
codepages that don't have characters assigned to all of the code points on
some newer systems, so they're using the Private Character Editor to
introduce those glyphs into the fonts on their systems for those
codepoints.  I'd guess that there are unicode codepoints for these glyphs,
but because the mainframes they're using aren't unicode enabled they don't
have the ability to correct the upstream system they depend on us to help
them work around the issue after the data has been transmitted as a print
stream to our software running on a newer platform.

Anyway, I appreciate the interest, and I'm in the process of testing the
suggested work around that Robin sent over.  I'll report back here based on
what I find.

Thanks,
--Dan

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Andy Robinson <andy at reportlab.com> wrote:

> Hi Dan,
>
> I used to work in Japan in 1989-1990, and remember the chaos it caused
> as each department in the company tried to keep a "custom font" on a
> shared drive with extra glyphs for specific customers.  Sometimes,
> people preferred to write their names with historic versions of
> characters that had been "officially" simplified, and well-meaning
> marketing managers and secretaries obliged them, causing nightmares
> thereafter because everyone would end up with slightly different
> versions of the font.  I naively hoped that Unicode had made this
> problem go away a couple of decades ago!
>
> Out of curiosity, is it the same problem?  Is there a legitimate
> reason why Chinese users can't use standard Unicode characters?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andy
>
>
> On 1 July 2015 at 15:26, Daniel Casper <dancasper at gmail.com> wrote:
> > To whom it may concern,
> >
> >
> >
> > I wanted to reach out and discuss the state of custom character set /
> custom
> > glyph support for the ReportLab libraries.  We currently use the open
> source
> > package in PDF Generation utilities that are used in many countries.  In
> > China specifically, our users make use of the Private Character Editor to
> > provide custom glyphs for fonts on their systems.  They then choose the
> font
> > EUDC to include those custom glyphs for their documents.  Unfortunately,
> > when attempting to register this font with the ReportLab library we
> receive
> > the following traceback:
> >
> >
> >
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >
> >   File reportlab\pdfbase\ttfonts.pyo, line 1009, in __init__
> >
> >   File reportlab\pdfbase\ttfonts.pyo, line 915, in __init__
> >
> >   File reportlab\pdfbase\ttfonts.pyo, line 413, in __init__
> >
> >   File reportlab\pdfbase\ttfonts.pyo, line 499, in extractInfo
> >
> > TTFError: Could not find PostScript font name
> >
> >
> >
> > Has anyone else worked with fonts that don't contain these PostScript
> names,
> > or is there some other way to go about getting them embedded?
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> >
> >
> > --Dan
> >
> >
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