[reportlab-users] RTL Patch Committed

[Hosam Aly]

Robin Becker wrote:


> Hosam Aly wrote:

>> Robin Becker wrote:

>>

> ...........

>>

>> Hello Robin. I am thinking about using UTF-16 because, I guess, we 

>> would be writing character points instead of font code points. When 

>> we are using font code points, the reader has no option but to render 

>> the font glyphs that we wrote. I wanted to see, if we used character 

>> points instead, whether the reader would be smart enough to do the 

>> shaping itself.

>>

>>

> .........

> I think that is right, but then the font has somehow to be known to 

> Acrobat Reader. I know this works in the CJK case for the places where 

> pdfdoc encoding would normally be used. UTF16 is required because the 

> fonts for the standard document annotations are not declared so the 

> fonts have to be standard.

>

> If you modify the test_hello.py test file ie

>

> change line 19 to

>

> c.setAuthor(u'\u0643\u0644\u0627\u0645 \u0639\u0631\u0628\u064a')

>

> then in the document properties you will see that Acrobat Reader does 

> get the visual reversal and character shaping correct (tested in 

> ubuntu and windows).

>

> However, I haven't declared any font there so presumably Acrobat is 

> using some standard system font.



I have tried changing the author text, and it worked as you said, but 
that's probably irrelevant to PDF rendering. The text is being shown in 
a text box, which uses the platform's APIs (Windows, GTK, etc.) to do 
the rendering, and those APIs automatically handle bidirectionality and 
character shaping.


What I really want to do is to get a UTF-16 sequence of characters 
inside the brackets of a BT tag, to get something similar to this:


BT

    /F13 12 Tf

    288 720 Td

    (\xff\xfe-\x063\x06'\x06E\x06) Tj

ET


(using a font that supports Arabic characters)


So I was wondering how I could get ReportLab to write a similar string 
into the PDF. I wish to know which method(s) I should be calling, or 
where to edit in ReportLab's code to test my hypothesis.



Thank you,


Hosam Aly

Software Engineer

Centrivision