Linux Cli: How to Render Arabic Text into Bitmap

linux CLI: how to render Arabic text into bitmap

Anyone can give me some successful results?

I can. I use convert from ImageMagick:

echo لوحة المفاتيح > text.txt && \
convert -size 300x200 \
        -background white \
        -fill black \
        -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/DroidNaskh-Regular.ttf \
        -pointsize 24 \
        -gravity Center \
        label:@text.txt \
        text.png

This is the result:

Some notes:

1. You need to use a font which defines the used characters (in your case an arabic font)
2. Always use a temporary file with the text inside instead of provide the text directly from the command line: it would lead to weird results

UPDATE I didn't notice the RTL part of the question; I think I got better results using pango (reference):

# On Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install libpango1.0-dev
echo -n لوحة المفاتيح > text.txt
pango-view text.txt --no-display --output text.png

Result:

phantomjs screenshot font missing, boxes rendered instead

I had a similar problem with Japanese fonts. (PhantomJS 1.9.1, Redhat on Amazon EC2)

English characters showed up fine, but Japanese characters were rendered as boxes.

How I fixed it:

1) Installed the (Japanese) IPA fonts (Mincho and Gothic) using yum install.

(Use yum list to check the exact package names.)

2) The IPA .ttf files were installed to:

• /usr/share/fonts/IPA-Gothic/
• /usr/share/fonts/IPA-Mincho/

3) Move the two downloaded .ttf files to this directory: (Create it)

• /usr/share/fonts/ipa/

4) Make a backup of /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

5) Edit the original /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and fill it with this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <dir>/usr/share/fonts/ipa</dir>
  <cachedir>/var/cache/fontconfig</cachedir>
  <cachedir>~/.fontconfig</cachedir>
  <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>IPAP Mincho</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>sans serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>IPAP Gothic</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>IPA Gothic</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

6) Refresh your font cache with fc-cache -vf

7) Enjoy your new working fonts.

Gotchas:

• If you're getting no characters (blank space), your font cache is probably out of date.
  Try fc-cache -vf to regenerate it.

• There's a fix for Japanese/Chinese/Korean characters in the 1.9.1 release. Not sure if it makes a difference, but probably worth upgrading from 1.9.0.

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