How to apply fallback font to page.insert_text

[smithah]

There is an issue where Noto Sans Devanagari Regular is printing boxes for English Characters, with page.insert_text, is there a way to add fallback font for insert_text ? Please let me know

[JorjMcKie]

No, there is no way to do that for insert_text/insert_textbox. TRextWriter.fill_textbox() support this.

Use Page.insert_htmlbox instead. This is BTW the only method to benefit from "text shaping" as supplied by the Harfbuzz library. Especially for text using Devanagari I cannot imagine how you are getting along with a character-based insertion method.

[smithah]

Thanks, character based insertion is working well with insert_text and it's faster. Using Noto Sans Devanagari,. It's filling up the white space in this method. Except English Characters are printed as boxes.

As per Discussion #3634

Tried quite a few approaches to reduce the spacing in the boxes. But the co-ordinates for rectangles are coming in from a predetermined source where placement of text to be done on blank pdf with some images on it already.

With insert_htmlbox Indic languages are broken character wise. Here insert_text
works very well except as mentioned above English Characters are printed as boxes. Hence looking to handle those with fallback font.

[JorjMcKie]

Ok, it is your decision in the end.
Again my recommendation not to using Noto Sans Devanagari but FiraGo (contained in pymupdf-fonts). It supports both Devanagari and Extended Latin.

[smithah]

Thanks will use that and update here.