How to convert a string to an image?

Question

I started to learn python a week ago and want to write a small program that converts a email to a image (.png) so that it can be shared on forums without risking to get lots of spam mails.

It seems like the python standard library doesn't contain a module that can do that but I've found out that there's a PIL module for it (PIL.ImageDraw).

My problem is that I can't seem to get it working.

So basically my questions are:

How to draw a text onto a image.
How to create a blank (white) image
Is there a way to do this without actually creating a file so that I can show it in a GUI before saving it?

Current Code:

import Image
import ImageDraw
import ImageFont

def getSize(txt, font):
    testImg = Image.new('RGB', (1, 1))
    testDraw = ImageDraw.Draw(testImg)
    return testDraw.textsize(txt, font)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    fontname = "Arial.ttf"
    fontsize = 11   
    text = "[email protected]"
    
    colorText = "black"
    colorOutline = "red"
    colorBackground = "white"


    font = ImageFont.truetype(fontname, fontsize)
    width, height = getSize(text, font)
    img = Image.new('RGB', (width+4, height+4), colorBackground)
    d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
    d.text((2, height/2), text, fill=colorText, font=font)
    d.rectangle((0, 0, width+3, height+3), outline=colorOutline)
    
    img.save("D:/image.png")

Could you show us what you have already tried and where it is going wrong? — robjohncox
– robjohncox, Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 11:08
i don't really have anything yet. The problem is that i can't find a real doc for the ImageDraw module so i don't know how to use it — Marco-
– Marco-, Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 11:18
@user1743130 it seems that PIL documentation from pythonware.com got removed. You could use the documentation which comes with python-imaging module though. — Jan Spurny
– Jan Spurny, Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 11:25
The latest documentation for the pillow fork of PIL can be found here. pillow supports Python 3, unlike PIL itself. — martineau
– martineau, Commented Sep 19, 2020 at 22:20

Jan Spurny · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-12 09:41:05Z

52

use ImageDraw.text - but it doesn't do any formating, it just prints string at the given location

img = Image.new('RGB', (200, 100))
d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
d.text((20, 20), 'Hello', fill=(255, 0, 0))

to find out the text size:

text_width, text_height = d.textsize('Hello')

When creating image, add an aditional argument with the required color (white):
```
img = Image.new('RGB', (200, 100), (255, 255, 255))
```
until you save the image with Image.save method, there would be no file. Then it's only a matter of a proper transformation to put it into your GUI's format for display. This can be done by encoding the image into an in-memory image file:
```
import cStringIO
s = cStringIO.StringIO()
img.save(s, 'png')
in_memory_file = s.getvalue()
```
or if you use python3:
```
import io
s = io.BytesIO()
img.save(s, 'png')
in_memory_file = s.getvalue()
```
this can be then send to GUI. Or you can send direct raw bitmap data:
```
raw_img_data = img.tostring()
```

edited Feb 12, 2020 at 9:41

answered Jul 25, 2013 at 11:23

Jan Spurny

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7 Comments

Marco- Over a year ago

is there a way to find out wich size the image has to be?

Jan Spurny Over a year ago

@user1743130 edited - but try to look for the documentation. Or you can just run python, write import ImageDraw and then help(ImageDraw), help(ImageDraw.textsize), etc.

Marco- Over a year ago

textsize only seems to change the size of the text but i want to know how big the image has to be so that the text fits in (in pixels)

Jan Spurny Over a year ago

@user1743130 textsize doesn't change anything, it tells you how big the text will be. So you can just create one "scrap" image to test for needed size and based on that, you'll create the real image

Marco- Over a year ago

why does the code in my question works fine for fontsize = 400 but if fontsize is set to 11 the text isn't centered and the image height is too high?

|

Uwe_98 · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-12 13:02:56Z

10

The first 3 lines are not complete, when I'm not wrong. The correct code would be:

from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageDraw
from PIL import ImageFont

answered Sep 12, 2019 at 13:02

Uwe_98

9851 gold badge10 silver badges23 bronze badges

2 Comments

Jan Spurny Over a year ago

This is necessary in modern Pillow package - in old, original PIL, import Image* was valid, there was no PIL subpackage.

dejjub-AIS Over a year ago

shorter code from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

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