Pillow: Bug in rendering Indic fonts

[rakeshvar]

ImageFont, ImageDraw do not render complex scripts with ligatures correctly. (On Ubuntu 14.04, Python 3.4.0)

This is how it looks in editor gedit:

This is how Pillow does it.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
#-*- coding:utf8 -*-

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw

im = Image.new("RGB",(160, 160))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)

font_telugu = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-indic-fonts-core/Pothana2000.ttf",50)
text_telugu = "నిత్య"

font_hindi = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-indic-fonts-core/gargi.ttf",50)
text_hindi = "नित्य"

draw.text((10, 10), text_telugu, font=font_telugu)
draw.text((10, 90), text_hindi, font=font_hindi)

im.show()

[wiredfool]

From a quick run through google, it appears that freetype doesn't support the necessary features to correctly combine glyphs into ligatures for complicated fonts/scripts. There are libraries such as harfbuzz [http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/] that build on freetype (+other dependencies) to render those scripts properly.

[rakeshvar]

I have both freetype and harfbuzz up to date on my system.

[aclark4life]

I'm going to guess that we have zero harfbuzz integration at present.

[wiredfool]

Closing, we'd require harfbuzz for this. We'd welcome pull requests for the integration.

[wiredfool]

This should be fixed in 4.2.0 with the merge of #2576

[rakeshvar]

Thanks, @ChillarAnand can you please test this?

[ChillarAnand]

@wiredfool Thanks for the patch. This doesn't seem to fix yet.

pip show pillow    
Name: Pillow
Version: 4.2.0
Summary: Python Imaging Library (Fork)
Home-page: https://python-pillow.org
Author: Alex Clark (Fork Author)
Author-email: [email protected]
License: Standard PIL License
Location: /home/chillar/.virtualenvs/py35/lib/python3.5/site-packages
Requires: olefile

Generated image

[wiredfool]

Can you check if raqm is in the features list?

from PIL import features
print (features.check('raqm'))

[ChillarAnand]

@rakeshvar @wiredfool Its working. Here is the rendered image.

[rakeshvar]

@ChillarAnand How did you get it to work? My features.check('raqm') is showing False.

[ChillarAnand]

Here is the script I have used to install it. I guess there is some issue with Pothana fonts itself. Its working with Vani and other fonts.

[menon92]

@ChillarAnand,
I have the same problem for Bangla language like this

How can I solve this

[ChillarAnand]

@menon92 Can you try with any other fonts?

[menon92]

@ChillarAnand
I have got the solution https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/3593

[rakeshvar]

The following worked for me on Ubuntu 18.04 with Python3.6.7:

1. sudo pip3 install Pillow -> installs 5.4.1
2. sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libharfbuzz-dev libfribidi-dev gtk-doc-tools
3. Install libraqm as described here (using configure, make, make install)
4. sudo ldconfig This step was needed!
5. Run the following test script: (Make sure the fonts are installed sudo apt install fonts-indic)

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw

im = Image.new("RGB",(160, 160))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)

font_telugu = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/fonts-telu-extra/Pothana2000.ttf",50)
text_telugu = "నిత్య"

font_hindi = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/Gargi/Gargi.ttf",50)
text_hindi = "नित्य"

draw.text((10, 10), text_telugu, font=font_telugu)
draw.text((10, 90), text_hindi, font=font_hindi)
im.show()

[khaledhosny]

Ubuntu 18.04 has libraqm0, so you should be able to install it and skip building Raqm manually.