Why no advanced shaping by default, or at least simple way to get advanced shaping?

[test3211234]

I just wrote a simple renderer with harfbuzz and freetype based off pillow's, and rendered cursive text with both. Pillow completely messed it up with wrong shaping and incorrect spacing. Is there a huge speed difference or something?

[radarhere]

Could you provide a self-contained example with the output image, and also an image showing what you expected?

[test3211234]

With just regular pillow text function, and mine on the left:

Font is here.

[radarhere]

Testing with the following code

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
ttf = ImageFont.truetype("EduNSWACTCursive-Regular.ttf", 64)

img = Image.new("RGB", (170, 110), "white")
d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
d.text((10, 10), "hello", font=ttf, fill="black")

img.save("out.png")

gives me

if I'm not using raqm, and

if I am.

So I conclude that you just need to have raqm installed. I don't know anything about your setup or how you installed Pillow, so I can only suggest starting at https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation/basic-installation.html

[test3211234]

Huh... installing raqm on windows seems to be less simple so I just compared your png with mine and: any idea why this is?

[radarhere]

I just wrote a simple renderer with harfbuzz and freetype based off pillow's

This is all I know about how you generated your version, so I don't have enough information to say why there are minor differences between the two. For all I know, you have chosen different flags in your C code, or we are using different versions of the libraries.

[test3211234]

Well I just tried on my mac and it seems the same as my renderer so great. I didn't seem to have to install anything for raqm to be enabled with Pillow on mac. Does raqm come by default with pillow on macos and linux?

[radarhere]

No. While I don't know how you installed Pillow, https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation/basic-installation.html states on macOS and Linux as well that

Raqm support requires FriBiDi to be installed separately