Cross platform TTF font render from Python [was: Load TTF from pycairo under Windows]

[Laszlo Nagy]

> .......
> the reportlab graphics renderPM(_renderPM) module does most things 
> with T1 and TTF and works linux/win32. We use freetype2 internally to 
> extract the curves from ttf and then draw them with libart_lgpl which 
> does anti-aliasing.
I just tried reportlab and RenderPM. I got the same error others got: it 
looks impossible to use it for creating raster images. Details here:

http://osdir.com/ml/python.reportlab.user/2005-06/msg00015.html

> I think something similar could be done directly with PIL and the 
> antigrain extension.
PIL would be ideal because it is lightweight and works on Windows and 
Linux too. But it is buggy. It doesn't render some east european 
(iso8859-2) characters, which we deperately need. Some TTF fonts are 
rendered incorrecly in PIL. Simply it doesn't work.
>
> I'm surprised when you say that libfreetype isn't available on 
> windows. It's a fairly hard road, but it can be travelled; certainly 
> we built the parts of freetype that we needed into our extension. That 
> required only a static library from freetype. I haven't needed to do 
> this on windows since 2.1.5 so perhaps it's harder now.
I'll try anything that might work. In fact I have already seen articles 
about windows + libfreetype on the internet, but I could not find 
statically linked libraries built against Python 2.6. If you could send 
me a few hints where to start, I would greatly appreciate it. The only 
one requirement that I do not want to start writting C code and glue 
together libraries by hand. Not because I'm lazy but because I would 
like to have something that can be installed easily on new windows 
systems, and have no dependency problems "out of the box".

Thank you for your efforts.

Laszlo