Generating images with text in them

[Terry Hancock]

On Thursday 21 July 2005 11:29 am, phil hunt wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:44:03 -0500, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> >On Wednesday 20 July 2005 11:59 pm, phil hunt wrote:
> >> I am trying to generate some images (gifs or pngs) with text in 
> >> them. I can use the Python Imaging Library, but it only has access 
> >> to the default, rather crappy, font.
> >
> >On the fly, or just during development?
> 
> Just during development.

There are several free vector graphics programs.  It would be fairly
trivial to hack a Skencil file to change text in it.  Could do the
same with an SVG file from Inkscape.  This would be a way to
generate your graphics.

I wrote a build utility for image resources based on Skencil which
creates images as part of your build process.   See:
http://buildimage.narya.net

That might be useful to you.

> I'm runnnig a desktop environment. For example Tkinter works fine.

Then Skencil is no problem if you want to use that.

> >While bitmap font files are not copyrightable, there are license issues
> >with most of the "nicer" fonts you are probably talking about.
> 
> Oh? I can understand them being copyrighted; but if they are not 
> copywritable, what licnese issues are there? In any case, there 
> presumably are not license issues with the fonts that come with a 
> standard GNU/Linux distribution such as SuSE 9.1, which is what I am 
> using.

*Bitmap* fonts are not copyrightable.*  TrueType and Type 1 fonts are
outline fonts and are copyrightable just like programs (indeed they 
technically are a kind of limited-domain program due to the coding of
"hints").

I see that the new ability to use True Type fonts solved your problem,
so I'll just leave it at that.  Glad you found a solution.

Cheers,
Terry


*In the US anyway -- they are regarded as too simple.  This might not
be true in other countries, it's clearly a judgement call.

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com