Writing text with diacritic ("nikud", vocalization marks) using PIL (Python Imaging Library)

Question

Writing simple text on an image using PIL is easy.

draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
draw.text((10, y), text2, font=font, fill=forecolor )

However, when I try to write Hebrew punctuation marks (called "nikud" or ניקוד), the characters do not overlap as they should. (I would guess this question is relevant also to Arabic and other similar languages.)

On supporting environment, these two words take up the same space/width (the below example depends on your system, hence the image):

סֶפֶר ספר

However when drawing the text with PIL I get:

ס ֶ פ ֶ ר

since the library probably doesn't obey kerning(?) rules.

Is it possible to have the character and Hebrew punctuation mark take up the same space/width without manually writing character positioning?

image - nikud and letter spacing http://tinypic.com/r/jglhc5/5

image url: http://tinypic.com/r/jglhc5/5

Answer 1

As for Arabic diacritics : Python +Wand(Python Lib) +arabic_reshaper(Python Lib) +bidi.algorithme(Python Lib). The same applies to PIL/Pillow, you need to use the arabic_reshaper and bidi.algorithm and pass the generated text to draw.text((10, 25), artext, font=font):

from wand.image import Image as wImage
from wand.display import display as wdiplay
from wand.drawing import Drawing
from wand.color import Color
import arabic_reshaper
from bidi.algorithm import get_display

reshaped_text = arabic_reshaper.reshape(u'لغةٌ عربيّة')
artext = get_display(reshaped_text)

fonts = ['C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\DroidNaskh-Bold.ttf',
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\Thabit.ttf',
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\Thabit-Bold-Oblique.ttf',
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\Thabit-Bold.ttf',
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\Thabit-Oblique.ttf',
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\majalla.ttf',         
         'C:\\Users\\PATH\\TO\\FONT\\Thabit-0.02\\majallab.ttf',

         ]
draw = Drawing()
img =  wImage(width=1200,height=(len(fonts)+2)*60,background=Color('#ffffff')) 
#draw.fill_color(Color('#000000'))
draw.text_alignment = 'right';
draw.text_antialias = True
draw.text_encoding = 'utf-8'
#draw.text_interline_spacing = 1
#draw.text_interword_spacing = 15.0
draw.text_kerning = 0.0
for i in range(len(fonts)):
    font =  fonts[i]
    draw.font = font
    draw.font_size = 40
    draw.text(img.width / 2, 40+(i*60),artext)
    print draw.get_font_metrics(img,artext)
    draw(img)
draw.text(img.width / 2, 40+((i+1)*60),u'ناصر test')
draw(img)
img.save(filename='C:\\PATH\\OUTPUT\\arabictest.png'.format(r))
wdiplay(img)