How to prepare a FreeType PIL/Pillow package for heroku and django?

Question

I know that this question has probably being asked several times, but so far none of the answers was addressing my specific problem.

I'm going to deploy a django application on Heroku; it needs to draw some text on an image and then display it to the user. The text will be in italian, meaning that unicode support is mandatory.

I'm encountering several problems:

• To use a ttf font i would need to provide the freetype library before installing PIL/Pillow
• If i use a pil font file (otf -> bdf -> pil), when PIL draws a non-ascii text i get a UnicodeEncodeError

A solution to one (or both) problem will resolve my issue:

• How to deploy PIL/Pillow on heroku with FreeType support
• How to draw non-ascii chars using PIL fonts

Many thanks

Answer 1

You can use this PIL fork at your requirements.txt on heroku with FreeType support:

-e git://github.com/errkk/gitpil.git#egg=PIL
Pillow==1.7.8