[reportlab-users] Character placement off - bug or am I using it wrong?

[Tim Roberts]

On 8/20/22 05:02, ellie wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I have an issue with .drawString() called on reportlab.pdfgen.Canvas, 
> it seems characters are placed wrong. For example, for the word "Two" 
> (created with reportlab's placement), the "T" and "w" are oddly apart. 
> Commas are spaced wrong as well, when I use a hack to use a placement 
> of another TTF lib it works.
>
> I use reportlab open-source 3.6.10, Python 3.10.6, and the font "Tex 
> Gyre Pagella" from the LaTeX community in TTF format.

How did you convert it to a TTF?  The font in the TeX library is an OTF 
with Postscript outlines, which Reportlab doesn't support.


> It looks like reportlab is placing letters with naive bounding boxes 
> rather than to properly overlap special pairs in whatever smart way 
> the font would provide. (That might be wrong, just my uninformed 
> guess.) Basically, like the sort of "placement hinting" of the font is 
> off (my bad if that's not how it's called) and it looks horrible as a 
> result.

"Kerning" is the word you're looking for.  Reportlab knows about 
kerning, so if they're in the font, it should work.

-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.