Generating images with text in them

[Daren Russell]

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. 
> 
> Ideally I'd like to use one of the nicer fonts that come with my X 
> Windows installation. Using Tkinter I can draw these fonts on the 
> screen; is there any way to get these fonts into a bitmapped image?
> For example, can I draw some text on a canvas and then "grab" that 
> canvas as a bitmap into PIL, and then save it as a file?
> 
> Alternately, is there a good source of PIL font files (.pil files)
> somewhere?
> 
> If the writers of the Python Imaging Library are reading this, may I 
> suggest that they add more fonts to it. Yes, that would increase 
> the size, but these days disk space is cheap and programmer time
> expensive.
> 

I've just been playing around with this.  You can use truetype fonts with:

font = ImageFont.truetype("/path/to/font.ttf", 12)

from version 1.1.4

http://www.pythonware.com/library/pil/handbook/imagefont.htm for more
details

HTH
Daren