python - How to use unicode characters with PIL?

Question

I would like to add Russian text to the image. I use PIL 1.1.7 and Python 2.7 on Windows machine. Since PIL compiled without libfreetype library, I use the following on development server:

font_text = ImageFont.load('helvR24.pil')
draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)

(helvR24.pil is taken from http://effbot.org/media/downloads/pilfonts.zip)

On Production environment I do the following:

font_text = ImageFont.truetype('HelveticaRegular.ttf', 24, encoding="utf-8")
draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)

(tried to use unic, cp-1251 instead of utf-8)

In both cases it doesn't display Russian characters ('squares' or dummy characters are displayed instead). I think it doesn't work on Development environment since most probably helvR24.pil doesn't contain Russian characters (don't know how to check it). But HelveticaRegular.ttf surely has it. I also checked that my .py file has геа-8 encoding. And it doesn't display Russian characters even with default font:

draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=ImageFont.load_default())

What else should I try / verify? I've looked thru https://stackoverflow.com/a/18729512/604388 - it doesn't help.

Answer 1

Waitting for answers