[reportlab-users] Kerning (was: CJK fonts )

[Henning von Bargen]

> > The slowest part in most real-world documents
> > is paragraph-wrapping, which requires us looking up the width of 
> > every character to size the words.
> Which reminds of that what I'm not seeing in any of the font or font 
> subsetting code is anything about kerning... is kerning a lost art with 
> modern scalable fonts, or is it just not bothered with except in 
> high-end typesetting applications?  I sort of expected to find some 
> kerning tables in the fonts, but haven't. At least, not yet.

Wordaxe does support automatic hyphenation and kerning.

See the SVN trunk (current revision is 110) at 
http://sourceforge.net/p/deco-cow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/

However, I failed to make it work with RL's ImageAndFlowables class.
That's why I did not release an official new version.

For an example with kerning support, see the file
http://sourceforge.net/p/deco-cow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/tests/test_truetype.py

I agree with Andy that kerning slows the paragraph-wrapping process down,
so personally I would only use it for headings and title, not for the
main text content.

HTH
Henning