Unable to render text with emojis

[novadev94]

I want to use Pillow to render text with emojis, to get it easy, I've used a font named Symbola.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
text = u'A😞B'
image = Image.new('RGB', (100, 100), 'white')
font = ImageFont.truetype('Symbola.ttf', size=36, encoding='unic')
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0, 0), text, (0, 0, 0), font=font)
image.show()

But seem like it doesn't succeed

When I switched to Apple Color Emoji, I have another problem on line

draw.text((0, 0), text, (0, 0, 0), font=font)

# Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "hello.py", line 13, in <module>
#     draw.text((0, 0), text, (0, 0, 0), font=font)
#   File "/work/emoji/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/ImageDraw.py", line 280, in text
#     mask, offset = font.getmask2(text, self.fontmode)
#   File "/work/emoji/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PIL/ImageFont.py", line 163, in getmask2
#     size, offset = self.font.getsize(text)
# IOError: invalid size handle

So what should I do to be able to render emojis?

---

May related to #1422

Also someone has reported a problem about ColorFont support in FreeType (this is a Chinese blog) http://www.cnblogs.com/palance/p/4809872.html

[gthomas]

👍 I'm also experiencing this issue

[hugovk]

symbola.ttf can be found here.

If you replace 😞 with the Python source code U0001F61E I get this on Ubuntu 14.04 (Python 2.7.6, Pillow 3.2.0):

But I still get this on Windows 7 (Python 2.7.11, Pillow 3.2.0):

(Here's the same thing reported but unsolved on Stack Overflow, confirming the problem on Mac and Windows but not Ubuntu.)

[doggan]

Same issue unfortunately 😦

Mac OS X 10.11.5, Python 2.7.10, Pillow 3.3.0.

[casenjo]

Has anyone had any progress on this issue? I'm trying to do the same thing on OS X Sierra (10.12.1) with Python 3 and Pillow 3.4.2 (and will need to achieve the same on Ubuntu as well)

[wiredfool]

The cnblog linked above google translates as:

I inserted some code inside the debugging information, positioning the problem occurred in the function call FT_Set_Pixel_Sizes inside, which is a freetype function call. Is it not freetype emoji fonts?

Continue to trace freetype, I found freetype 2.5 is called from the beginning to support the color font, I use the 2.6, should be no problem.

I https://gist.github.com/jokertarot/7583938 to find a color font support code, a closer look at the first three steps to use freetype:

1, call Init initialization library

2, construct FreeTypeFace object, generate typeface

3, call SetXXXFont, note that in this step ordinary font and Color font is not the same, ordinary font calls SetNormalFont, internal call FT_Set_Pixel_Sizes; and Color font call SetColorFont, internal call FT_Select_Size

Looking back Pillow-master / _imagingft.c the getfont function, he is not distinguish between NormalFont and ColorFont, according to NormalFont to deal with, so wrong.

This should be the core issue: freetype support color font, but in the specific treatment of the need to use a different interface in the Pillow this layer is not taken into account, it is Pillow can not support color font. To solve the problem, you must make the changes in getfont in Pillow-master / _imagingft.c.

Freetype that support color font code I have not tried, go back and then specialized study.

So it does seem that it's possible with freetype, it's a matter of building it in.

[hugovk]

Current status with Pillow 4.2.1:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
text = u'A😞B'
# text = u'A\U0001F61EB'
image = Image.new('RGB', (100, 50), 'white')
font = ImageFont.truetype('Symbola.ttf', size=36, encoding='unic')
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0, 0), text, (0, 0, 0), font=font)
image.show()

text	OS	Python	Result
u'A😞B'	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS	Python 2.7.12
u'A😞B'	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS	Python 3.5.2
u'A\U0001F61EB'	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS	Python 2.7.12
u'A\U0001F61EB'	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS	Python 3.5.2
u'A😞B'	macOS Sierra 10.12.5	Python 2.7.13
u'A😞B'	macOS Sierra 10.12.5	Python 3.6.2
u'A\U0001F61EB'	macOS Sierra 10.12.5	Python 2.7.13
u'A\U0001F61EB'	macOS Sierra 10.12.5	Python 3.6.2
u'A😞B'	Windows 7	Python 2.7.11
u'A😞B'	Windows 7	Python 3.5.0
u'A\U0001F61EB'	Windows 7	Python 2.7.11
u'A\U0001F61EB'	Windows 7	Python 3.5.0

[odelalleau]

Just checking if there's any hope to see it fixed on Windows in the not-too-distant future?

[guitar9]

With Linux Mint it does no work. There are only questionmarks

[quantumpotato]

Bump. I see only a square box on mac.
I tried putting u"My ✨ string here", I tried with u"\U0001f44d" too.

[nulano]

@hugovk Can you check this again with Pillow 6.1? This looks to me like another duplicate of #3777 which was fixed in #3780 for Python 3.x.