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:

1. How to draw a text onto a image.
2. How to create a blank (white) image
3. 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")

Answer 1

1. 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')
   

2. When creating image, add an aditional argument with the required color (white):

   img = Image.new('RGB', (200, 100), (255, 255, 255))
   

3. 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()