python - How I can load a font file with PIL.ImageFont.truetype without specifying the absolute path?

Question

When I write the code in Windows, this code can load the font file just fine:

ImageFont.truetype(filename='msyhbd.ttf', size=30);

I guess the font location is registered in Windows registry. But when I move the code to Ubuntu, and copy the font file over to /usr/share/fonts/, the code cannot locate the font:

 self.font = core.getfont(font, size, index, encoding)
 IOError: cannot open resource

How can I get PIL to find the ttf file without specifying the absolute path?

Answer 1

To me worked this on xubuntu:

from PIL import Image,ImageDraw,ImageFont

# sample text and font
unicode_text = u"Hello World!"
font = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeMono.ttf", 28, encoding="unic")

# get the line size
text_width, text_height = font.getsize(unicode_text)

# create a blank canvas with extra space between lines
canvas = Image.new('RGB', (text_width + 10, text_height + 10), "orange")

# draw the text onto the text canvas, and use black as the text color
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(canvas)
draw.text((5,5), u'Hello World!', 'blue', font)

# save the blank canvas to a file
canvas.save("unicode-text.png", "PNG")
canvas.show()

Windows version

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

unicode_text = u"Hello World!"
font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 28, encoding="unic")
text_width, text_height = font.getsize(unicode_text)
canvas = Image.new('RGB', (text_width + 10, text_height + 10), "orange")
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(canvas)
draw.text((5, 5), u'Hello World!', 'blue', font)
canvas.save("unicode-text.png", "PNG")
canvas.show()

The output is the same as above: