[local.cl-pdf.devel] Re: [cl-pdf-devel] The cl-pdf repository is online

[Marc Battyani]

> I've just tried cl-pdf and it looks and works great! I must say I'm
> rather impressed.

Thanks!

> So now for the questions: is there a way to make it work with Unicode
> text? I've tried some Unicode (UTF-8 encoded) characters, but didn't get
> very good results. It seems that the only that passes through correctly
> is 8-bit ISO-8859-1. And I also need ISO-8859-2 and Japanese :-)

You can create all the the 8 bits encoding you want. (Please send them if
you make useful ones)
But there is no support yet for multibytes encodings.

> Now, I'm sure it's a thorny issue, having to do with fonts, encodings,
> and CL implementation's support for Unicode, but I thought I'd ask what
> the major obstacles are.

No major obstacles IMO. It's well documented in the PDF reference from
adobe.

> BTW, I'm trying cl-pdf and cl-typesetting out of frustration with LaTeX.

I started cl-typesetting exactly for the same reason. cl-typesetting can
already do lots of things than TeX can't do, but it is still missing all the
upper layers to be usable as a general purpose formatter. The good news is
that as it's written in Common Lisp, it won't take years of development to
do this. If we work on it that is ;-)

Marc