[Savannah-users] Re: [bug #21506] Crashes with error: Unhandled PIL error exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError

[Donn]

> Follow-up Comment #1, bug #21506 (project fontypython):
> UPDATE: Just after I emailed the developer, I found the problem. The error
> was what it sounds like: a Unicode name. In this case, the font began with
> an "AE" ligature. (I won't try to reproduce it here, you get the idea.)
Yup - unicode is a real issue. Fonts come from all corners of the globe and 
their filenames are often deeply strange to me (a westerner!). 
This should be raised on the FP mailing list as an important issue.

It's not only unicode font file names that crash PIL. There are some fonts 
(which I have given to Jason - the new lead dev) which kill PIL pronto even 
if they have been renamed. This is a problem within PIL itself and has 
prompted me to start trying to find ways to draw arbitrary fonts with other 
libraries -- right now I am experimenting with Cairo/Freetype2.

We have an idea at the moment to keep track of the last valid font and to flag 
a crash so that on restart it will query the user about the bad font that 
last killed the app. 

\d