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Does Pillow want my text parameters to be unicode or strings?

The function in question:
PIL.ImageDraw.Draw.text(xy, text, fill=None, font=None, anchor=None)
The issue is pretty standard... gibberish:
Right now, I'm running a string (utf-8) into the draw text function above, but it's giving all those weird characters. However, if I just print it, it shows the characters fine.
Should I pass a Unicode object instead?

This works correctly on Python 3.6.2 and 2.7.13 with pillow-4.2.1 (strings are default Unicode in Python 3.x). Chinese didn't display with the default font, but Arial MS Unicode worked.
#coding:utf8
from PIL import Image,ImageDraw,ImageFont
im = Image.new('1',(100,100))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
font = ImageFont.truetype(font='ARIALUNI.TTF',size=20)
draw.text((0,0),u'马克','white',font=font)
im.show()
Output:

Fonts aliasing in Pillow

I'm using Pillow 3.1.1 image library and Python 3.5.1.
I'm trying to use Pillow for drawing fonts on images. But results looks absolutely ugly and unacceptable.
1st example: looks like font not antialiased. But docs contains absolutely nothing on aliasing fonts. I've tried to make some changes (e.g. set fonttype), but texts still looks terrible.
1st example
And second example. Sometimes characters just overlay each other. And I don't have any idea how it could be fixed.
2nd example
I'm so frustrated with my experience. Is it possible to fix aliasing problem in Pillow or I should look to ImageMagick side?
Aliasing problem is my main concern, I cannot use fonts rendered such way.
Thanks for your attention!
Code example:
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
DEFAULT_OFFSET = (100, 160, )
def draw_text(image, text):
base = Image.open(image).convert('RGBA')
txt_image = Image.new('RGBA', base.size, (255, 255, 255, 0))
ttf = get_font()
fnt = ImageFont.truetype(ttf, 40)
d = ImageDraw.Draw(txt_image)
# just return some string in format 'blah-blah\nblah-blah'
multiline = generate_multiline(txt_image, text)
d.multiline_text(DEFAULT_OFFSET, multiline, align='left', font=fnt, fill=(40, 40, 40, 200))
out = Image.alpha_composite(base, txt_image)
out.show()

Accordingly to martineau comment, Pillow doesn't support font anti-aliasing.

Rendering Emoji with PIL

I am trying to make images out of tweets, however some of them contain Emojis. I am using PIL to render my images and the Symbola font.
The text is in unicode utf-8 encoding and the Symbola font does include the emojis. Here is an abridged version of the code:
from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
text = u"\U0001f300" #CYCLONE emoji
image = Image.new("RGBA", (100,100), (255,255,255))
font = ImageFont.truetype("Symbola.ttf", 60, encoding='unic')
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.text((0,0), text, (0,0,0), font=font)
image.save("Test.png")
image.show()
This just renders and image with two rectangles instead of the emoji
Would appreciate any help or ideas.
Thanks!
EDIT: As falsetru pointed out, this code does run in Ubuntu, however it doesn't run on Windows or on Mac. Any ideas?

If the symbol CYCLONE u"\U0001f300" (I download a Symbola.tff from web) then is a very simple to use with PIL:
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont, ImageFilter
#configuration
font_size=36
width=500
height=100
back_ground_color=(255,255,255)
font_size=36
font_color=(0,0,0)
unicode_text =u"\U0001f300"
im = Image.new ( "RGB", (width,height), back_ground_color )
draw = ImageDraw.Draw ( im )
unicode_font = ImageFont.truetype("Symbola.ttf", font_size)
draw.text ( (10,10), unicode_text, font=unicode_font, fill=font_color )
im.show()
Take a look at this

There was a bug in Pillow, see #1774 or #3777. This should now be fixed in version 6.1 of Pillow with PR#3780, but only for Python 3.x.

If you are looking to write symbols with your original font, you can do this by merging your font with Symbola.ttf or any emojis font. You can merge the two fonts using fontforge (https://fontforge.org/).
start fontforge, open up your main font,
Click menu: element->merge fonts and choose your emoji font (Symbola.ttf).
answer no for any popup dialog.
optionally change your new font's name: element->font info.
finally go to file->generate fonts when done and save it as ttf (TrueType).
Now, you can use your generated font to draw text with emojis!

Unicode problem with text in images in Python

I need to create in python an image with unicode chars like △ ▽ ◆ ◇ ◎ ◯ but I don't find the way.. I wonder how firefox or other programs print them well with the same font I use even.. this is my code
#!/usr/local/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
chars = u'△ 0x25b3, ▽ 0x25bd, ◅ 0x25c5, ◆ 0x25c6, ◇ 0x25c7, ◎ 0x25ce, ◯ 0x25ef'
img = Image.new('L', (500,50), 255)
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
draw.text((0,0), chars, font=ImageFont.truetype('cour.ttf', 11))
img.save(r'D:\\test.jpg')

You need to pick a font which contains those glyph's. Most likely the font face you are using, cour.ttf, does not contain the glyphs you are trying to write. You could try cyberbit.ttf.

Python Imaging Library - Text rendering

I'm trying to render some text using PIL, but the result that comes out is, frankly, crap.
For example, here's some text I wrote in Photoshop:
and what comes out of PIL:
As you can see, the results from PIL is less than satisfactory. Maybe I'm just being picky, but is there any way to draw text using PIL that gets results more close to my reference image?
Here's the code I'm using on Python 2.7 with PIL 1.1.7
image = Image.new("RGBA", (288,432), (255,255,255))
usr_font = ImageFont.truetype("resources/HelveticaNeueLight.ttf", 25)
d_usr = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
d_usr = d_usr.text((105,280), "Travis L.",(0,0,0), font=usr_font)

I came up with my own solution that I find acceptable.
What I did was render the text large, like 3x the size it needs to be then scale it resize it down with antialiasing, it's not 100% perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than default, and doesn't require cairo or pango.
for example,
image = Image.new("RGBA", (600,150), (255,255,255))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
font = ImageFont.truetype("resources/HelveticaNeueLight.ttf", fontsize)
draw.text((10, 0), txt, (0,0,0), font=font)
img_resized = image.resize((188,45), Image.ANTIALIAS)
and you endup with this result,
which is a lot better than what I was getting before with the same font.

Try using pycairo - the python bindings for the Cairo drawing library -- it is usefull for more refined drawing, with antialiased lines,
and such - and you can generate vector based images as well
Correctly handling fonts, and layout is complicated, and requires the use of
the "pango" and "pangocairo" libraries as well. Although they are made
for serious font work (all GTK+ widgets do use pango for font rendering),
the available docuemtnation and examples are extremely poor.
The sample bellow shows the prints available in the system and renders the
sample text in a font family passed as parameter on the command line.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import cairo
import pango
import pangocairo
import sys
surf = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, 320, 120)
context = cairo.Context(surf)
#draw a background rectangle:
context.rectangle(0,0,320,120)
context.set_source_rgb(1, 1, 1)
context.fill()
#get font families:
font_map = pangocairo.cairo_font_map_get_default()
families = font_map.list_families()
# to see family names:
print [f.get_name() for f in font_map.list_families()]
#context.set_antialias(cairo.ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL)
# Positions drawing origin so that the text desired top-let corner is at 0,0
context.translate(50,25)
pangocairo_context = pangocairo.CairoContext(context)
pangocairo_context.set_antialias(cairo.ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL)
layout = pangocairo_context.create_layout()
fontname = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) >= 2 else "Sans"
font = pango.FontDescription(fontname + " 25")
layout.set_font_description(font)
layout.set_text(u"Travis L.")
context.set_source_rgb(0, 0, 0)
pangocairo_context.update_layout(layout)
pangocairo_context.show_layout(layout)
with open("cairo_text.png", "wb") as image_file:
surf.write_to_png(image_file)

I've never used PIL, but a quick review of the documentation for the Draw method indicates that PIL provides a way to render simple graphics. Photoshop provides a way to render complex graphics. To get anywhere close to Photoshop-like results requires, at a minimum, font hinting and anti-aliasing. PIL's documentation doesn't even hint at having such capabilities. You may want to look at using an external tool that might do a better job of rendering text on images. For example, ImageMagick (you'll want to use the 8-bit version, which handles standard 24-bit RGB). You can find some text drawing samples here: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/draw/

Suggestion: use Wand or a different Imaging library
Here's an example with wand -
from wand.color import Color
from wand.image import Image
from wand.drawing import Drawing
from wand.compat import nested
with Drawing() as draw:
with Image(width=1000, height=100, background=Color('lightblue')) as img:
draw.font_family = 'Indie Flower'
draw.font_size = 40.0
draw.push()
draw.fill_color = Color('hsl(0%, 0%, 0%)')
draw.text(0,int(img.height/2 + 20), 'Hello, world!')
draw.pop()
draw(img)
img.save(filename='image.png')

In python3 there is an option for aliased fonts. I couldn't find this answer anywhere, hopefully it helps someone like me who found this question on google and had to dig a long time to find the answer.
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
draw.fontmode = "L"
Mentioned in the docs here

You can also try to write the font two times it increases the quality immense.
image = Image.new("RGBA", (288,432), (255,255,255))
usr_font = ImageFont.truetype("resources/HelveticaNeueLight.ttf", 25)
d_usr = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
d_usr = d_usr.text((105,280), "Travis L.",(0,0,0), font=usr_font)
d_usr = d_usr.text((105,280), "Travis L.",(0,0,0), font=usr_font)