How do I draw text at an angle using python's PIL?

Question

Using Python I want to be able to draw text at different angles using PIL.

For example, imagine you were drawing the number around the face of a clock. The number 3 would appear as expected whereas 12 would we drawn rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees.

Therefore, I need to be able to draw many different strings at many different angles.

Answer 1

Draw text into a temporary blank image, rotate that, then paste that onto the original image. You could wrap up the steps in a function. Good luck figuring out the exact coordinates to use - my cold-fogged brain isn't up to it right now.

This demo writes yellow text on a slant over an image:

# Demo to add rotated text to an image using PIL

import Image
import ImageFont, ImageDraw, ImageOps

im=Image.open("stormy100.jpg")

f = ImageFont.load_default()
txt=Image.new('L', (500,50))
d = ImageDraw.Draw(txt)
d.text( (0, 0), "Someplace Near Boulder",  font=f, fill=255)
w=txt.rotate(17.5,  expand=1)

im.paste( ImageOps.colorize(w, (0,0,0), (255,255,84)), (242,60),  w)

Answer 2

It's also usefull to know our text's size in pixels before we create an Image object. I used such code when drawing graphs. Then I got no problems e.g. with alignment of data labels (the image is exactly as big as the text).

(...)
img_main = Image.new("RGB", (200, 200))
font = ImageFont.load_default()

# Text to be rotated...
rotate_text = u'This text should be rotated.'

# Image for text to be rotated
img_txt = Image.new('L', font.getsize(rotate_text))
draw_txt = ImageDraw.Draw(img_txt)
draw_txt.text((0,0), rotate_text, font=font, fill=255)
t = img_value_axis.rotate(90, expand=1)

The rest of joining the two images together is already described on this page. When you rotate by an "unregular" angle, you have to improve this code a little bit. It actually works for 90, 180, 270...

Answer 3

I'm not saying this is going to be easy, or that this solution will necessarily be perfect for you, but look at the documentation here:

http://effbot.org/imagingbook/pil-index.htm

and especially pay attention to the Image, ImageDraw, and ImageFont modules.

Here's an example to help you out:

import Image
im = Image.new("RGB", (100, 100))
import ImageDraw
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
draw.text((50, 50), "hey")
im.rotate(45).show()

To do what you really want you may need to make a bunch of separate correctly rotated text images and then compose them all together with some more fancy manipulation. And after all that it still may not look great. I'm not sure how antialiasing and such is handled for instance, but it might not be good. Good luck, and if anyone has an easier way, I'd be interested to know as well.

Answer 4

Here is a working version, inspired by the answer, but it works without opening or saving images.

The two images have colored background and alpha channel different from zero to show what's going on. Changing the two alpha channels from 92 to 0 will make them completely transparent.

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw

text = 'TEST'
font = ImageFont.truetype(r'C:\Windows\Fonts\Arial.ttf', 50)
width, height = font.getsize(text)

image1 = Image.new('RGBA', (200, 150), (0, 128, 0, 92))
draw1 = ImageDraw.Draw(image1)
draw1.text((0, 0), text=text, font=font, fill=(255, 128, 0))

image2 = Image.new('RGBA', (width, height), (0, 0, 128, 92))
draw2 = ImageDraw.Draw(image2)
draw2.text((0, 0), text=text, font=font, fill=(0, 255, 128))

image2 = image2.rotate(30, expand=1)

px, py = 10, 10
sx, sy = image2.size
image1.paste(image2, (px, py, px + sx, py + sy), image2)

image1.show()