[smc-discuss] Project: PyPDFLib

[Santhosh Thottingal]

Friends,
We all know that there is no PDF library which can support Indic
scripts. We ourself have seen many requests for this in various
mailing lists. The workaround available is to generate ODT file and
then doing export.  In case of python the default pdf library is
reportlab which does not support any complex scripts. Wikipedia's page
export feature is broken for complex script languages because of these
limitations.
We are starting a project to address this problem. The project is
named as PyPDFLib and hosted here :
http://github.com/santhoshtr/pypdflib
The project uses Pango for complex script rendering and Cairo for PDF
and graphics manipulations. Project is in Python and licensed under
LGPLv3+
The current status :
* Basic set of APIs in working condition. Widgets such as paragraph,
header, footer, line, h1,h2 etc., image(not all formats) are available
now.
* Basic configurations like Font, size, alignment etc
* Sample program with Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam, and Bengali texts.
* Another sample program which converts a wikipedia article to PDF -
tested with Indic languages, English etc

Project is in initial stage, so expect many bugs. But if interested
play with the apis , report bugs, give patches..

Thanks
Santhosh Thottingal