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...