`ImageFont` module¶

The ImageFont module defines a class with the same name. Instances of this class store bitmap fonts, and are used with the PIL.ImageDraw.ImageDraw.text() method.

Pillow uses its own font file format to store bitmap fonts, limited to 256 characters. You can use to_imagefont() to convert BDF and PCF font descriptors (X Window font formats) to this format:

from PIL import PcfFontFile
with open("Tests/fonts/10x20-ISO8859-1.pcf", "rb") as fp:
    font = PcfFontFile.PcfFontFile(fp)
    imagefont = font.to_imagefont()

Starting with version 1.1.4, PIL can be configured to support TrueType and OpenType fonts (as well as other font formats supported by the FreeType library). For earlier versions, TrueType support is only available as part of the imToolkit package.

When measuring text sizes, this module will not break at newline characters. For multiline text, see the ImageDraw module.

Warning

To protect against potential DOS attacks when using arbitrary strings as text input, Pillow will raise a ValueError if the number of characters is over a certain limit, MAX_STRING_LENGTH.

This threshold can be changed by setting MAX_STRING_LENGTH. It can be disabled by setting ImageFont.MAX_STRING_LENGTH = None.

Example¶

from PIL import ImageFont, ImageDraw

draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)

# use a bitmap font
font = ImageFont.load("arial.pil")

draw.text((10, 10), "hello", font=font)

# use a truetype font
font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 15)

draw.text((10, 25), "world", font=font)

Functions¶

Methods¶

Constants¶

class PIL.ImageFont.Layout¶

BASIC¶: Use basic text layout for TrueType font. Advanced features such as text direction are not supported.

RAQM¶

Use Raqm text layout for TrueType font. Advanced features are supported.

Requires Raqm, you can check support using PIL.features.check_feature() with feature="raqm".

PIL.ImageFont.MAX_STRING_LENGTH¶: Set to 1,000,000, to protect against potential DOS attacks. Pillow will raise a ValueError if the number of characters is over this limit. The check can be disabled by setting ImageFont.MAX_STRING_LENGTH = None.