Weird characters on Debian

[osam]

It working correctly on my development machine but when I deployed the app I got these weird characters from nowhere, as you can see from this image:

This is my PIL log:

--------------------------------------------------------------------
PIL 1.1.7 SETUP SUMMARY
--------------------------------------------------------------------
version       1.1.7
platform      linux2 2.7.3 (default, Dec  2 2012, 14:33:47)
              [GCC 4.4.5]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*** TKINTER support not available
--- JPEG support available
--- ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
--- FREETYPE2 support available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Your help would be appreciated.

[mbi]

Interesting.

Could it be you are using a different font set between dev and production? Also, what is the character encoding of either installations?

[osam]

Could it be you are using a different font set between dev and production?

No but when I faced the problem I tried to change the default font and that didn't solve the problem.

what is the character encoding of either installations?

Character encoding of what exactly?

[mbi]

Sorry, the default text encoding, i.e. the output of:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()

[mbi]

Also, are you using a custom generator, or is that the default simplemath generator? See, I think the weird chars before each valid char are due to the fact that PIL (or freetype2) receives an Unicode string (or other encoded multi-byte chars) and misinterprets those as multiple chars.

If this is indeed a custom generator, could you please try and force the returned bits to string?

[osam]

~$ python Python 2.7.3 (default, Dec 2 2012, 14:33:47) [GCC 4.4.5] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import sys sys.getdefaultencoding() 'ascii'

are you using a custom generator, or is that the default simplemath generator?

The default but it has nothing to do with the math generator per se I think. I am also getting the rectangles with the letter based captchas. I fixed it temporarily by removing the spaces from ' %s ': https://github.com/mbi/django-simple-captcha/blob/master/captcha/views.py#L52-L54

I had to switch to the letter mode because operators + / * - where also showing as rectangles.