CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonfontspython-imaging-library
wong2
wong2

Reputation: 35750

How to use PIL (pillow) to draw text in any language?

I'm rendering user input text on a background image with Python PIL(I'm using pillow).

the code is simple:

draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
draw.text((x, y), text, font=font, fill=font_color)

the problem is, the user may input in any language, how could I determine which font to use?

ps: I know I have to have font files first, so I searched and found Google Noto, downloaded all the fonts, put them in /usr/local/share/fonts/, but these fonts are separated by language, so I still can't load a font that can render all user input texts.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2943

Answers (1)

Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans

Reputation: 53617

NoTo (which is literally just Adobe's Source Pro fonts with a different name because it's easier for Google to market it that way) isn't a single font, it's a family of fonts. When you go to download them, Google explicitly tells you that there are lots of different versions for lots of different target languages, for the two simple reasons that:

  1. if you need to typeset the entire planet's set of known scripts, there are vastly more glyphs than fit in a single font (OpenType fonts have a hard limit of 65535 glyphs per file due to the fact that glyph IDs are encoded as USHORT fields. And fonts are compositional: the "letter" ℃　can actually be the letter C and the symbol °, so it relies on three glyphs: two real glyphs, and one virtual composition. You run out of space real fast that way) , and
  2. even if a font could fit all the glyphs, the same script may need to be rendered rather different depending on the language it's used for, so even having a single font for both Chinese and Japanese, or for Arabic and Urdu, simply doesn't work. While OpenType fonts can cope with that by being told which variation sets to use, and which compositional rules based on specific language tags, that is the kind of control that works great in InDesign or LaTeX, and is the worst thing for fonts that are going to be used in control-less context (like an Android webview, for instance).

So the proper solution is to grab all the fonts, and then pick the right one based on the {script, language} pair you're generating text for. Is that more complicated than what you're trying to do? Yes. Is it necessary? Equally yes =)

Upvotes: 6

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