On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Nasir Khan <nasir8891(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
From the very beginning, there is a problem in the PDF Download tool and
that is it can not properly render the Bengali and some of the other Indic
languages (might be all Indic languages). A few bug was reported earlier
and the developers tried to solve the issues but unfortunate it was not
completely fixed.
The PDF library used with the Collection extension of Mediawiki is
reportlab. Reportlab uses its own internal rendering engine and not
capable of handling complex scripts like Indic. Such a rendering
engine will not scale to meet the requirements of hundreds of
scripts/languages that we support.
Here i have a question that at this moment is there
any developer of
developer group is working on this issue? if yes then i want to join with
him.
I had discussed this with Pediapress developers in the past. I
started a project many months back to develop a general purpose PDF
rendering library for complex scripts and I had announced it here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/002198.…
And I have an online version based on the code in development
http://silpa.org.in/Render. It can create PDFs from Bengali wiki pages
and possibly most of the scripts that we support. The text rendering
engine used is Pango. This is my petproject and 2-3 people joined me,
but recently it is inactive in development since we are not getting
free time. The library require lot of work to reach a reasonably
usable state. Then it require good amount of effort to integrate with
collection extension.
The project is hosted at
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pypdflib
and available in Debian.
Thanks
Santhosh