Choosing a PIL.ImageFont by font name rather than filename, and cross-platform font

Question

ImageFont.truetype requires a filename to work, such as:

font = ImageFont.truetype("ariblk.ttf")  # Arial Black

Is there a way with PIL, to load a font by name, rather than filename?

Context: I would like to load a bold (with heavy weight) sans-serif font, that would work on any platform Windows, Linux, Mac.

I don't think ImageFont.truetype("ariblk.ttf") will work cross-platform, is it possible to load it with ImageFont.truetype("Arial Black") or, better, ImageFont.truetype("sans-serif;bold") that would work on all platforms?

Answer 1

Looking at the documentation of Pillow's ImageFont module, there's no such an option, no.

A handy workaround might be to use Matplotlib's font_manager module for that: A module for finding, managing, and using fonts across platforms. Using the FontProperties and findfont, you should get the a valid path to a font with the given properties, which you can then use in the common ImageFont.truetype call.

Here's a small example, which runs perfectly fine on my Windows machine. Unfortunately, I don't have any other OS nearby to test.

from matplotlib import font_manager
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

font = font_manager.FontProperties(family='sans-serif', weight='bold')
file = font_manager.findfont(font)
print(file)

img = Image.new('RGB', (400, 300), (255, 255, 255))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(img)

font = ImageFont.truetype(file, 48)
draw.text((20, 20), 'Hello World', font=font, fill=(255, 0, 0))

img.save('test.png')

The print output:

...\Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\mpl-data\fonts\ttf\DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf

The image output:

----------------------------------------
System information
----------------------------------------
Platform:      Windows-10-10.0.16299-SP0
Python:        3.9.1
Matplotlib:    3.3.4
Pillow:        8.1.0
----------------------------------------