How to use unicode characters with PIL?

Question

I would like to add Russian text to the image. I use PIL 1.1.7 and Python 2.7 on Windows machine. Since PIL compiled without libfreetype library, I use the following on development server:

font_text = ImageFont.load('helvR24.pil')
draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)

(helvR24.pil is taken from http://effbot.org/media/downloads/pilfonts.zip)

On Production environment I do the following:

font_text = ImageFont.truetype('HelveticaRegular.ttf', 24, encoding="utf-8")
draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)

(tried to use unic, cp-1251 instead of utf-8)

In both cases it doesn't display Russian characters ('squares' or dummy characters are displayed instead). I think it doesn't work on Development environment since most probably helvR24.pil doesn't contain Russian characters (don't know how to check it). But HelveticaRegular.ttf surely has it. I also checked that my .py file has геа-8 encoding. And it doesn't display Russian characters even with default font:

draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=ImageFont.load_default())

What else should I try / verify? I've looked thru https://stackoverflow.com/a/18729512/604388 - it doesn't help.

Answer 1

I had a similar issue and solved it.

There are a couple things you have to be careful about:

1. Ensure that your strings are interpreted as unicode, either by importing unicode_literarls from _____future_____ or by prepending the u to your strings
2. Ensure you are using a font that is unicode,there are some free here: open-source unicode typefaces I suggest this: dejavu

here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont, ImageFilter

#configuration
font_size=36
width=500
height=100
back_ground_color=(255,255,255)
font_size=36
font_color=(0,0,0)
unicode_text = u"\u2605" + u"\u2606" + u"Текст на русском"

im  =  Image.new ( "RGB", (width,height), back_ground_color )
draw  =  ImageDraw.Draw ( im )
unicode_font = ImageFont.truetype("DejaVuSans.ttf", font_size)
draw.text ( (10,10), unicode_text, font=unicode_font, fill=font_color )

im.save("text.jpg")

here is the results