Help requested for for Devanagri fonts in Python GUIs

Gaurav Trivedi

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Oct 14, 2020, 9:38:32 PM10/14/20

to sanskrit-programmers

Hi Everyone:

I was wondering if anyone here had some experience with using Devanagari with Python GUI libraries. Here are some open issues in popular frameworks that provide more details:

Thanks,

Gaurav

Shreevatsa R

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Oct 14, 2020, 11:46:27 PM10/14/20

to sanskrit-programmers

I don't have any experience myself, but my understanding is that, as the linked issues say, you need to ultimately use something like Harfbuzz for text shaping (possibly via a layer like Pango).

FWIW, I tried the default tkinter library that comes with Python, using the first tutorial I found online, and it seems to work fine:

>>> import tkinter as tk
>>> window = tk.Tk()
DEPRECATION WARNING: The system version of Tk is deprecated and may be removed in a future release. Please don't rely on it. Set TK_SILENCE_DEPRECATION=1 to suppress this warning.
>>> greeting = tk.Label(text="Hello, Tkinter")
>>> greeting.pack()
>>> greeting2 = tk.Label(text="विद्या")
>>> greeting2.pack()

(I picked विद्या because it contains both a short-i vowel sign, and a d-y conjunct.) Result:

So it may be the fancier GUI libraries that are broken.

Also the Pillow link says it should work with libraqm installed, but I haven't tried it.

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Ram Kosuru

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Oct 15, 2020, 1:14:23 PM10/15/20

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I do not know much about the background ; but the following may be useful. Consider adding layout_engine parameter (I found this in stack overflow discussion forum)

you need to add raqm module: apt-get install libaqm-dev

img = Image.new('RGBA', (100, 70), color = (73, 109, 137))

fnt = ImageFont.truetype('sahadeva.ttf', 15, layout_engine=ImageFont.LAYOUT_RAQM)

d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)

#d.text((10,10), u"यात्रा ", font=fnt, fill=(255, 255, 0))

d.text((10,10), "यात्रा ऋच्छति", font=fnt, fill=(255, 255, 0))

img.save('pil_text_font.png')

A question I have is: can I do reverse programmatically: if I have .png with devanagari and english text can I get text back?