When I write the code in Windows, this code can load the font file just fine:

ImageFont.truetype(filename='msyhbd.ttf', size=30);

I guess the font location is registered in Windows registry. But when I move the code to Ubuntu, and copy the font file over to /usr/share/fonts/, the code cannot locate the font:

 self.font = core.getfont(font, size, index, encoding) IOError: cannot open resource

How can I get PIL to find the ttf file without specifying the absolute path?

1

6 Answers

To me worked this on xubuntu:

from PIL import Image,ImageDraw,ImageFont
# sample text and font
unicode_text = u"Hello World!"
font = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeMono.ttf", 28, encoding="unic")
# get the line size
text_width, text_height = font.getsize(unicode_text)
# create a blank canvas with extra space between lines
canvas = Image.new('RGB', (text_width + 10, text_height + 10), "orange")
# draw the text onto the text canvas, and use blue as the text color
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(canvas)
draw.text((5,5), u'Hello World!', 'blue', font)
# save the blank canvas to a file
canvas.save("unicode-text.png", "PNG")
canvas.show()

Windows version

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
unicode_text = u"Hello World!"
font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 28, encoding="unic")
text_width, text_height = font.getsize(unicode_text)
canvas = Image.new('RGB', (text_width + 10, text_height + 10), "orange")
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(canvas)
draw.text((5, 5), u'Hello World!', 'blue', font)
canvas.save("unicode-text.png", "PNG")
canvas.show()

The output is the same as above:

0

According to the PIL documentation, only Windows font directory is searched:

On Windows, if the given file name does not exist, the loader also looks in Windows fonts directory.

So you need to write your own code to search for the full path on Linux.

However, Pillow, the PIL fork, currently has a PR to search a Linux directory. It's not exactly clear yet which directories to search for all Linux variants, but you can see the code here and perhaps contribute to the PR:

2

There is a Python fontconfig package, whereby one can access system font configuration, The code posted by Jeeg_robot can be changed like so:

from PIL import Image,ImageDraw,ImageFont
import fontconfig
# find a font file
fonts = fontconfig.query(lang='en')
for i in range(1, len(fonts)): if fonts[i].fontformat == 'TrueType': absolute_path = fonts[i].file break
# the rest is like the original code:
# sample text and font
unicode_text = u"Hello World!"
font = ImageFont.truetype(absolute_path, 28, encoding="unic")
# get the line size
text_width, text_height = font.getsize(unicode_text)
# create a blank canvas with extra space between lines
canvas = Image.new('RGB', (text_width + 10, text_height + 10), "orange")
# draw the text onto the text canvas, and use black as the text color
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(canvas)
draw.text((5,5), u'Hello World!', 'blue', font)
# save the blank canvas to a file
canvas.save("unicode-text.png", "PNG")
canvas.show()

1

On mac, I simply copy the font file Arial.ttf to the project directory and everything works.

2

On Mac I had some fonts in the project dependencies

$ find . -name *.ttf*
./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/werkzeug/debug/shared/ubuntu.ttf
./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/reportlab/fonts/Vera.ttf
./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/reportlab/fonts/VeraBI.ttf
./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/reportlab/fonts/VeraBd.ttf
./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/reportlab/fonts/VeraIt.ttf

so I passed in Vera like so

font = ImageFont.truetype(r'./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages/reportlab/fonts/Vera.ttf', 50)

you can also get a font like this but the size was too small

font = ImageFont.load_default()

In Windows 10 while using Visual code, i had to do as below to make it work.

font = ImageFont.truetype(os.environ['LOCALAPPDATA'] + "/Microsoft/Windows/Fonts/Dance Floor.ttf", 10)

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