[omaha] Languages, fonts, scripts?

[Steve Young]

In case anyone needs to deal with this in the future:

Some languages have some advanced scripts - for example Hindi has
'dependent vowels':
In some words, written vowels change their form in order to join up with
consonants.

- With ‘i’: ि – कि [ki] is a combination of क + इ (k + i). The character ि is
added to the left and above.

There are about a dozen of these rules. When typing the Hindi word किताब
('book' in English) you press क then  ि and the result is कि.

Reportlabs does not seem to know the rule, and prints क ि. I have not been
able to figure exactly why reportlabs fails, so I started trying other
solutions. (kind of a bummer, because up to that point I liked working with
it)

On the web, using font-families helps solve the problem of missing glyphs,
as there can be many fonts in a family. (there are still too many glyphs to
put all the languages into a single font) and most OS's since around 2006
recognize most of the world's languages.

I looked at xhtml2pdf but it uses the reportlab toolkit so I thought it
might have the same problem, and moved on to WeasyPrint.  Like xhtml2pdf It
uses html and css to format the output, and pycairo to save to a pdf.
Pycairo seems to convert the text to vector graphics so I don't have to
worry about embedding fonts. I sent a pdf sample to the printer for
approval and keeping my fingers crossed.

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Jeff Hinrichs - DM&T <jeffh at dundeemt.com>
wrote:

> In general, for the web, you need to always think about graceful
> degradation.  Our designers, who generally work in print, or like to submit
> a graphic, tend to specify individual fonts, without considering what
> happens if a specified font is not available to the users browser.
>
> http://ffffallback.com/
> http://blog.typekit.com/2011/03/24/type-study-choosing-fallback-fonts/
>
> -j
>
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Steve Young <wereapwhatwesow at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Sorry for the run on thread.
> >
> > For example on my site I have:
> >
> > font-family: "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
> >
> > and this has so far been able to display all the text properly in its
> > respective languages.
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 9:26 AM, Steve Young <wereapwhatwesow at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I just found this https://code.google.com/p/noto/issues/detail?id=13,
> > > which describes my question exactly. And gives the answer that, no,
> there
> > > is not on font to rule them all, and I am going to have to deal with
> > > multiple fonts creating my PDFs.
> > >
> > > But can someone answer how the website manages this?  Does it have
> > > something to do with specifying font families instead of individual
> > fonts?
> > >
> > > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Steve Young <
> wereapwhatwesow at gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Question about fonts:
> > >>
> > >> Still working on a flashcard site with Django 1.7 and python 3.3.  So
> > far
> > >> the website has handled all the text in latin, cyrillic, arabic,
> hindi,
> > >> without a hitch.  I copy the text and paste it into the django admin
> for
> > >> that field and it just works.
> > >>
> > >> I thought this magic was working because of unicode fonts, but while
> > >> working with reportlab and creating pdfs the magic goes away and I
> have
> > to
> > >> choose fonts that contain the correct characters for the languages.
> > >>
> > >> Has anyone worked with languages and can point me in the right
> direction
> > >> to learn about this?
> > >>
> > >> Thanks.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Omaha at python.org
> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/omaha
> > http://www.OmahaPython.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Best,
>
> Jeff Hinrichs
> 402.218.1473
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