[Image-SIG] bug report: font sometimes not obeying kerning rules

[Shula Amokshim]

Writing Latin text on an image using PIL is easy.

However, when I try to write Hebrew punctuation marks (called "nikud" or 
?????), the characters does not overlap (as it should).

On supporting environment, these two words take up the same space/width 
(the below example depend on your system, hence the image):

????? ???

However when drawing the text with PIL i'd get

? ? ? ? ?

Since the library probably doesn't obey kerning(?) rules,the error 
(latter example) occurs in all the ttf fonts I have installed (200+) 
beside DejaVuSans.ttf and Lucida*.ttf, on which it works OK.

See example as an image (url: http://tinypic.com/r/jglhc5/5) 
<http://tinypic.com/r/jglhc5/5>
See differences in rendering among various fonts 
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=sgiu1i&s=3 
<http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=sgiu1i&s=3>

I guess this question is relevant also to Arabic and other similar 
languages with overlapping characters.


Note:
there's also a "bug" (or an unimplemented feature) not dealing with 
bidirectional (bidi-, RTL) fonts. Meaning, Hebrew text on the image is 
printed backwards. But that's another issue.


Here's my original discusstion on StackOverflow:


http://stackoverflow.com/questions/993265/writing-text-with-diacritic-nikud-vocalization-marks-using-pil-python-image

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