title: How to use unicode characters with PIL?
body: <p>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 <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/4011715/604388">without libfreetype library</a>, I use the following on development server:</p>
  
  <pre><code>font_text = ImageFont.load('helvR24.pil')
  draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(<code>helvR24.pil</code> is taken from <a href="http://effbot.org/media/downloads/pilfonts.zip" rel="noreferrer">http://effbot.org/media/downloads/pilfonts.zip</a>)</p>
  
  <p>On Production environment I do the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>font_text = ImageFont.truetype('HelveticaRegular.ttf', 24, encoding="utf-8")
  draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=font_text)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(tried to use <code>unic</code>, <code>cp-1251</code> instead of <code>utf-8</code>)</p>
  
  <p>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 <code>helvR24.pil</code> doesn't contain Russian characters (don't know how to check it). But <code>HelveticaRegular.ttf</code> surely has it. I also checked that my <code>.py</code> file has геа-8 encoding. And it doesn't display Russian characters even with default font:</p>
  
  <pre><code>draw.text((0, 0), 'Текст на русском', font=ImageFont.load_default())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What else should I try / verify? I've looked thru <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/18729512/604388">https://stackoverflow.com/a/18729512/604388</a> - it doesn't help.</p>