CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-app-engine
oliversturm
oliversturm

Reputation: 33

How do I load an alternative font for PIL ImageFont on App Engine?

I have successfully ported some Python code to App Engine that uses PIL's ImageFont and ImageDraw to generate a dynamic image. The only remaining problem is that the original code loads a TrueType font using a call like this:

titlefont = ImageFont.truetype("Verdana Bold.ttf", titlefontsize)

I can't just upload the font file and access it directly in GAE (at least I don't think I can?!). I guess it might be possible somehow to dump font data in a datastore blob, load that and feed it into PIL, but this seems less than elegant, and quite wasteful if everybody who uses PIL for image generation does the same thing. Currently I'm stuck with ImageFont.load_default() though, which gives pretty horrendous looking results.

Is there some clever way of working with alternative fonts in GAE PIL? Some additional API I'm missing that will return usable font objects?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1086

Answers (1)

Paul Collingwood
Paul Collingwood

Reputation: 9116

Any file in your applications directory will be uploaded along with your application when you deploy it.

So yes, you should be able to "just" access any file you need by keeping it in or under your application directory, moving it there if necessary.

If you want to serve those files, that's something different. https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/staticfiles

But try including your .ttf file where your app can locate it and it should just work.

Upvotes: 3

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