Add font support for Arabic font 'Tajawal'

[YDA93]

Describe the Bug

'Tajawal' is a Google font which unfortunately cannot be rendered perfectly.

Minimal Example to Reproduce

<style>
    @import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Tajawal:wght@400;500;700;800;900&display=swap');

    * {
        font-family: 'Tajawal', sans-serif;
    }
</style>

Expected Behavior

Should render any character normally just like Google font 'Amiri'

Actual Behavior

Some characters does not work:

System Information

OS version: macOS 13.3.1 (22E261)
Python version: 3.10.11
XHTML2PDF version: 0.2.9

[timobrembeck]

@YDA93 Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, there is no active community maintaining this project, so if you would like to have this font supported, you would likely have to to provide a contribution yourself.

In the meantime, I'd suggest you try out "MarkaziText", which is mentioned in the docs, or "DejaVu", which has proven to be working in one of my projects...

[YDA93]

@timoludwig I would surely love to contribute and fix this, I only need some guidance on how this can be done?

[timobrembeck]

Sadly, I'm not quite familiar with all the internals, maybe @luisza can give a hint in the right direction?

[luisza]

Hello,

I think using "body dir="rtl"" could have a positive effect. In case you want to develop it, I'm attaching the lines where the change of letter direction is made. I don't use rtl as such, so clear examples of what should happen using fonts supported by reportlab could help give an idea of how an html code with rtl should turn out.

xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf/context.py

Line 436 in 9e3c88a

def reverse_sentence(sentence):

xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf/reportlab_paragraph.py

Line 425 in 35014fc

def reverse_sentence(sentence):

xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf/reportlab_paragraph.py

Line 1253 in 35014fc

frag_words = _getFragWords(frags, reverse=self.dir == 'rtl')