Unexpected results from .pcf font for chars >128

[wiredfool]

This is likely a unicode issue somewhere.

In Py2.x, results are as expected. In Py3.x, the high ascii characters are not printed as expected.

excerpted and modified from test_font_pcf.py

fontname = "Tests/fonts/7x13-ISO8859-5.pcf"
tempname = tempfile("temp.pil", "temp.pbm")

def test_draw():

    message = str("".join([chr(i+1) for i in range(223)]))

    font = ImageFont.load(tempname)
    image = Image.new("L", font.getsize(message), "white")
    draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
    draw.text((0, 0), message, font=font)
    image.save('chars.png')

Incorrect:

Correct:

The generated temp fonts are the same, It appears to be an issue in the rendering.

This was reported in IRC by AleXoundOS, hoisted here to document.

[wiredfool]

The essential problem here is that a unicode string (in python 3) is interpreted as a string that is a series of bytes (in the c-api). I believe that the solution, especially for the old, 256 character non-unicode aware fonts, is to convert the incoming string into a latin-1 encoded bytes object, which should be easily used as a uchar *.