Converting Text to Image with Unicode characters

Question

So, the idea here is that the given text, which happens to be Devanagari character such as संस्थानका कर्मचारी and I want to convert given text to image. Here is what I have attempted.

def draw_image(myString):

    width=500
    height=100
    back_ground_color=(255,255,255)
    font_size=10
    font_color=(0,0,0)
    unicode_text = myString

    im  =  Image.new ( "RGB", (width,height), back_ground_color )
    draw  =  ImageDraw.Draw (im)
    unicode_font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", font_size)
    draw.text ( (10,10), unicode_text, font=unicode_font, fill=font_color )
    im.save("text.jpg")

    if cv2.waitKey(0)==ord('q'):
        cv2.destroyAllWindows()

But the font is not recognized, so the image consists of boxes, and other characters that are not understandable. So, which font should I use to get the correct image? Or is there any better approach to convert, the given text in character such as those, to image?

Answer 1

So I had a similar problem when I wanted to write text in Urdu onto images, firstly you need the correct font since writing purely with PIL or even openCV requires the appropriate Unicode characters, and even when you get the appropriate font the letters of one word are disjointed, and you don't get the correct results.

To resolve this you have to stray a bit from the traditional python-only approach since I was creating artificial datasets for an OCR, i needed to print large sets of such words onto a white background. I decided to use graphics software for this. Since some like photoshop even allows you to write scripts to automate processes.

The software I went for was GIMP, which allows you to quickly write and run extensions.scripts to automate the process. It allows you to write an extension in python, or more accurately a modified version of python, known as python-fu. Documentation was limited so it was difficult to get started, but with some persistence, I was able to write functions that would read text from a text file, and place them on white backgrounds and save to disk.

I was able to generate around 300k images from this in a matter of hours. I would suggest if you too are aiming for large amounts of text writing then you too rely on python-fu and GIMP.

For more info you may refer to the GIMP Python Documentation