Edward Cannon: > On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 10:11 AM, Dinu Gherman > <gher...@darwin.in-berlin.de> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm trying to generate bitmap files dynamically using Python, PIL and >> TrueType fonts. When deploying my code on a WebFaction.com box with >> a preinstalled PIL I observe nasty differences (most visible in the >> string widths) in the text being rendered compared to my development >> box, a MacBook with OS X 10.6 with my own Python/PIL installation >> (both with Python 2.7.3 and PIL 1.1.7). >> >> I've contacted the WebFaction support team, speculating about differ- >> ences in the JPEG, PNG and/or Freetype libraries used. It's not solved, >> but now I think Freetype might be the best guess since the output makes >> no difference between PNG and JPEG. WebFaction told me to install a >> custom PIL following their recipes here, but that didn't help (in fact >> the differences compared with my Mac even increased): >> >> >> http://community.webfaction.com/questions/7340/how-to-install-pil-with-truetype-support >> >> In order to test this I've written a simple script and put it on Gist >> here (with two small PNG files attached for an Arial TTF), so people >> can tweak it if they like: >> >> https://gist.github.com/3248606 >> >> While I haven't given up hope on the WebFaction support I have two >> questions for this list: >> >> 1. I wonder if I can expect the exact same rendering on different >> platforms with PIL and TrueType at all? >> >> 2. Is there some way to tell quickly (ideally at run time) which li- >> braries (and versions) went into building PIL and, maybe, where >> they reside in the system? >> >> Any help is highly appreciated. >> >> Regards, >> >> Dinu > > I don't have much experience with this topic, but you could try > looking at the selftest.py script that comes with PIL (you probably > ran it during your install) as I recall it prints some useful > information out, so it must be able to determine information about the > install. > Edward
Well, after some additional tests with many TTFs I concluded that PIL itself (or Freetype for its sake) must be somehow broken and not quite able to handle various TTFs consistently, since I get pretty different results when placing strings for different fonts - even on the same box! So I abandoned the idea of using PIL for that purpose and switched to ReportLab instead which seems to use libart for restarization, apparent- ly including fonts. This gives me predictable output for all fonts and two different platforms, Mac OS X and WebFaction's CentOS without all the previous hassle. Regards, Dinu _______________________________________________ Image-SIG maillist - Image-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/image-sig