Using Material Design Icons as font

[nickehallgren]

I looked at the fontawesome icons example and used that as my starting point and it worked great until I noticed that the icons I need have five characters. The code I use looks like this:

text = '\uF02D1'

should be the "mdi-battery-charging-high" icon but the output to the screen (SSD1306) is the "mdi-amazon" ('\uF02D'). Is this a bug or am I doing it wrong?

https://cdn.materialdesignicons.com/4.7.95/

[thijstriemstra]

ping @rm-hull

[rm-hull]

Working code example showing the problem would be a great help

[nickehallgren]

The code is very basic.

font1 = ImageFont.truetype('fonts/materialdesignicons-webfont.ttf',40)

with canvas(device) as draw:
  text = '\uF02D1'
  draw.rectangle(device.bounding_box, outline="white", fill="black")
  draw.text((1, 1), text, font=font1, fill="white")

[rm-hull]

draw is simply a Pillow ImageDraw instance, so the draw.text(...) method invoked is actually https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/ImageDraw.html#PIL.ImageDraw.PIL.ImageDraw.ImageDraw.text

Hence, I suspect that Pillow and/or FreeType possibly doesn't fully support the full range of unicode characters. Before we investigate any further, what version of Pillow and FreeType are you using?

[nickehallgren]

Python 3.7.3 (default, Apr  3 2019, 05:39:12) 
[GCC 8.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PIL
>>> PIL.PILLOW_VERSION
'6.2.1'
>>>

How do I get the freetype version? Tried import freetype but I don't have it on my system...

[rm-hull]

Ok, turns out \u is the 16-bit unicode hex representation, so only reads the following 4 characters. To get 32-bit unicode values, use \U (upper-case) instead ... so the following should work as expected:

text = '\U000F02D1'

I learned something new today...!

[nickehallgren]

So did I, I tried

text = '\u000F02D1'

earlier but it didn't work and now I understand why. Thanks!