This is a summary of changes made to the reportlab source code for each release.
Please refer to subversion backlogs (using the release dates) for more details
or for releases which we have not provide a higher level changes list for.
E.g. to retrieve the changes made between release 1.19 and release 1.20, type:

  svn log -r {2004-11-25T18:00}:{2004-01-21T18:00}

The contributors lists are in no order and apologies to those accidentally not
mentioned. If we missed you, please let us know!

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#################### future RELEASE 2.3                         #################
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PDF

  Encryption support (see encrypt parameter on Canvas and BaseDocTemplate constructor)

Platypus

  TableOfContents - Creates clickable tables of contents
  Variable border padding for paragraphs (using the borderPadding style attribute)
  New programming Flowable, docAssert, used to assert expressions on wrap time.

Bug fixes

   Fixed old documentation and installation issues
   610 - Fixed Image anchoring code to match documentation
   704 - renderSVG groups problem
   706 - rl_codecs.py now compatible with WordAxe
   and others...

Contributors 
------------

Yoann Roman
Dinu Gherman
Dirk Holtwick
Marcel Tromp
Henning von Bargen
Paul Barrass
Adrian Klaver

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#################### RELEASE 2.2  at 18:00 GMT  10/Sep/2008     #################
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PDF

  pdfmetrics: Added registerFontFamily function
  Basic support for pdf document viewer preferences (e.g.: fullscreen).

Platypus

  Paragraph <img> tag support for inline images.
  Paragraph autoleading support (helps with <img> tags).
  Platypus doctemplate programming support.
  Support for tables with non-uniform row length.

Graphics

  RGBA image support for suitable bitmap types.
  LTO labelling barcode.

And many bugfixes...

Contributors 
------------

Matt Folwell
Jerome Alet
Harald Armin Massa
kevin@booksys.com
Sebastian Ware
Martin Tate
Wietse Jacobs
Christian Jacobs
Volker Haas
Dinu Gherman
Dirk Datzert
Yuan Hong
Ilpo Nyyss�nen
Thomas Heller
Gael Chardon
Alex Smishlajev
Martin Loewis
Dirk Holtwick
Philippe Makowskic
Ian Sparks
Albertas Agejevas
Gary Poster
Martin Zohlhuber
Francesco Pierfederici
michael@stroeder.com
Derik Barclay
Publio da Costa Melo 
Jon Dyte
David Horkoff
picodello@yahoo.it
R�diger M�hl
Paul Winkler
Bernhard Herzog
Alex Martelli
Stuart Bishop
Gael Chardon

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#################### RELEASE 2.1  at 15:00 GMT  24/May/2007     #################
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Contributors 
------------

Ilpo Nyyss�nen
Thomas Heller
Gael Chardon
Alex Smishlajev
Martin Loewis       
Dirk Holtwick
Philippe Makowskic
Dinu Gherman
Ian Sparks
 
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#################### RELEASE 2.0  at 15:00 GMT  23/May/2006     #################
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Contributions
-------------

Andre Reitz
Max M
Albertas Agejevas
T Blatter
Ron Peleg
Gary Poster
Steve Halasz
Andrew Mercer
Paul McNett
Chad Miller

Unicode support
---------------

This is the Big One, and the reason some apps may break. You must now pass in 
text either in UTF-8 or as unicode string objects. The library will handle 
everything to do with output encoding. There is more information on this below.

Since this is the biggest change, we'll start by reviewing how it worked in the 
past. In ReportLab 1.x, any string input you passed to our APIs was supposed to 
be in the same encoding as the font you selected for output. If using the 
default fonts in Acrobat Reader (Helvetica/Times/Courier), you would have 
implicitly used WinAnsi encoding, which is almost exactly the same as Latin-1. 
However, if using TrueType fonts, you would have been using UTF-8. For Asian 
fonts, you had a wide choice of encodings but had to specify which one (e.g 
Shift-JIS or EUC for Japanese). This state of affairs meant that you had to 
make sure that every piece of text input was in the same encoding as the font 
used to display it.

With ReportLab 2, none of that necessary. Instead:

Here is what's different now:

Input text encoding is UTF-8 or Python Unicode strings

  Any text you pass to a canvas API (drawString etc.), Paragraph or other 
  flowable constructor, into a table cell, or as an attribute of a graphic (e.g. 
  chart.title.text), is supposed to be unicode. If you use a traditional Python 
  string, it is assumed to be UTF-8. If you pass a Unicode object, we know it's 
  unicode. 

Font encodings

  Fonts still work in different ways, and the built-in ones will still use 
  WinAnsi or MacRoman internally while TrueType will use UTF-8. However, the 
  library hides this from you; it converts as it writes out the PDF file. As 
  before, it's still your job to make sure the font you use has the characters 
  you need, or you may get either a traceback or a visible error character. 
  Asian CID fonts

  You no longer need to specify the encoding for the built-in Asian fonts, 
  just the face name. ReportLab knows about the standard fonts in Adobe's Asian 
  Language Packs. 

Asian Truetype fonts

  The standard Truetype fonts differ slightly for Asian languages (e.g 
  msmincho.ttc). These can now be read and used, albeit somewhat inefficiently. 
  Asian word wrapping

  Previously we could display strings in Asian languages, but could not 
  properly wrap paragraphs as there are no gaps between the words. We now have a 
  basic word wrapping algorithm.

unichar tag

  A convenience tag, <unichar/> has also been added. You can now do <unichar 
  code="0xfc"/> or <unichar name='LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS'/> and get 
  a lowercase u umlaut. Names should be those in the Unicode Character Database.
  Accents, Greeks and symbols

  The correct way to refer to all non-ASCII characters is to use their 
  unicode representation. This can be literal Unicode or UTF-8. Special symbols 
  and Greek letters (collectively, "greeks") inserted in paragraphs using the 
  greek tag (e.g. <greek>lambda</greek>) or using the entity references (e.g. 
  &lambda;) are now processed in a different way than in version 1. Previously, 
  these were always rendered using the Zapf Dingbats font. Now they are always 
  output in the font you specified, unless that font does not support that 
  character. If the font does not support the character, and the font you 
  specified was an Adobe Type 1 font, Zapf Dingbats is used as a fallback. 
  However, at present there is no fallback in the case of TTF fonts. Note that 
  this means that documents that contain greeks and specify a TTF font may need 
  changing to explicitly specify the font to use for the greek character, or you 
  will see a black square in place of that character when you view your PDF 
  output in Acrobat Reader.

Other New Features
------------------

PDF

  Improved low-level annotation support for PDF "free text annotations"
    FreeTextAnnotation allows showing and hiding of an arbitrary PDF "form" 
    (reusable chunk of PDF content) depending on whether the document is printed or 
    viewed on-screen, or depending on whether the mouse is hovered over the 
    content, etc.
  TTC font collection files are now readable
    ReportLab now supports using TTF fonts packaged in .TTC files
  East Asian font support (CID and TTF)
    You no longer need to specify the encoding for the built-in Asian 
    fonts, just the face name. ReportLab knows about the standard fonts in Adobe's 
    Asian Language Packs. 
  Native support for JPEG CMYK images
    ReportLab now takes advantage of PDF's native JPEG CMYK image support, 
    so that JPEG CMYK images are no longer (lossily) converted to RGB format before 
    including them in PDF. 

Platypus

  Link support in paragraphs
    Platypus paragraphs can now contain link elements, which support both 
    internal links to the same PDF document, links to other local PDF documents, 
    and URL links to pages on the web. Some examples:

    Web links:
        <link href="http://www.reportlab.com/">ReportLab<link>
    Internal link to current PDF document:
        <link href="summary">ReportLab<link>
    External link to a PDF document on the local filesystem:
        <link href="pdf:c:/john/report.pdf">ReportLab<link>

  Improved wrapping support
    Support for wrapping arbitrary sequence of flowables around an image, 
    using reportlab.platypus.flowables.ImageAndFlowables (similar to 
    ParagraphAndImage).
  KeepInFrame
    Sometimes the length of a piece of text you'd like to include in a 
    fixed piece of page "real estate" is not guaranteed to be constrained to a 
    fixed maximum length. In these cases, KeepInFrame allows you to specify an 
    appropriate action to take when the text is too long for the space allocated 
    for it. In particular, it can shrink the text to fit, mask (truncate) 
    overflowing text, allow the text to overflow into the rest of the document, or 
    raise an error.
  Improved convenience features for inserting unicode symbols and other 
  characters
    <unichar/> lets you conveniently insert unicode characters using the 
    standard long name or code point. Characters inserted with the <greek> tags 
    (e.g. <greek>lambda</greek>) or corresponding entity references (e.g. &lambda;) 
    support arbitrary fonts (rather than only Zapf Dingbats).
  Table spans and splitting improved
    Cell spanning in tables used to go wrong sometimes when the table split 
    over a page. We believe this is improved, although there are so many table 
    features that it's hard to define correct behaviour in all cases.
  KeepWithNext improved
    Paragraph styles have long had an attribute keepWithNext, but this was 
    buggy when set to True. We believe this is fixed now. keepWithNext is important 
    for widows and orphans control; you typically set it to True on headings, to 
    ensure at least one paragraph appears after the heading and that you don't get 
    headings alone at the bottom of a column. 

Graphics

  Barcodes
    The barcode package has been added to the standard reportlab 
    toolkit distribution (it used to live separately in our contributions area). It 
    has also seen fairly extensive reworking for production use in a recent 
    project. These changes include adding support for the standard European EAN 
    barcodes (EAN 8 and EAN13).
  Improvements to Legending
    Instead of manual placement, there is now a attachment point (N, 
    S, E, W, etc.), so that the legend is always automatically positioned correctly 
    relative to the chart. Swatches (the small sample squares of colour / pattern 
    fill sometimes displayed in the legend) can now be automatically created from 
    the graph data. Legends can now have automatically-computed totals (useful for 
    financial applications).
  More and better ways to place piechart labels
    New smart algorithms for automatic pie chart label positioning 
    have been added. You can now produce nice-looking labels without manual 
    positioning even for awkward cases in big runs of charts.
  Adjustable piechart slice ordering
    For example. pie charts with lots of small slices can be 
    configured to alternate thin and thick slices to help the label placement 
    algorithm work better.
  Improved spiderplots

Noteworthy bug fixes

  Fixes to TTF splitting (patch from Albertas Agejevas)
    This affected some documents using font subsetting
  Tables with spans improved splitting
    Splitting of tables across pages did not work correctly when the table had
    row/column spans
  Fix runtime error affecting keepWithNext

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#################### Older releases #################
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Please refer to subversion backlogs for a low level change list.

RELEASE 1.20 at 18:00 GMT  25/Nov/2004
RELEASE 1.19 at 18:00 GMT  21/Jan/2004
RELEASE 1.18 at 12:00 GMT  9/Jul/2003
RELEASE 1.17 at 16:00 GMT  3/Jan/2003
RELEASE 1.16 at 16:00 GMT  7/Nov/2002
RELEASE 1.15 at 14:00 GMT  9/Aug/2002
RELEASE 1.14 at 18:00 GMT 28/May/2002
RELEASE 1.13 at 15:00 GMT 27/March/2002
RELEASE 1.12 at 17:00 GMT 28/February/2002
RELEASE 1.11 at 14:00 GMT 12/December/2001
RELEASE 1.10 at 14:00 GMT 06/November/2001
RELEASE 1.09 at 14:00 BST 13/August/2001
RELEASE 1.08 at 12:00 BST 19/June/2001
RELEASE 1.07 at 11:54 BST 2001/05/02
RELEASE 1.06 at 14:00 BST 2001/03/30
RELEASE 1.03 on 2001/02/09
RELEASE 1.02 on 2000/12/11
RELEASE 1.01 on 2000/10/10
RELEASE 1.00 on 2000/07/20
RELEASE 0.95 on 2000/07/14
RELEASE 0.94 on 2000/06/20
