Center-/middle-align text with PIL?

Solution 1:

Use Draw.textsize method to calculate text size and re-calculate position accordingly.

Here is an example:

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw

W, H = (300,200)
msg = "hello"

im = Image.new("RGBA",(W,H),"yellow")
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
w, h = draw.textsize(msg)
draw.text(((W-w)/2,(H-h)/2), msg, fill="black")

im.save("hello.png", "PNG")

and the result:

If your fontsize is different, include the font like this:

myFont = ImageFont.truetype("my-font.ttf", 16)
draw.textsize(msg, font=myFont)

Solution 2:

Here is some example code which uses textwrap to split a long line into pieces, and then uses the textsize method to compute the positions.

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
import textwrap

astr = '''The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains.'''
para = textwrap.wrap(astr, width=15)

MAX_W, MAX_H = 200, 200
im = Image.new('RGB', (MAX_W, MAX_H), (0, 0, 0, 0))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
font = ImageFont.truetype(
    '/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial.ttf', 18)

current_h, pad = 50, 10
for line in para:
    w, h = draw.textsize(line, font=font)
    draw.text(((MAX_W - w) / 2, current_h), line, font=font)
    current_h += h + pad

im.save('test.png')

Solution 3:

One shall note that the Draw.textsize method is inaccurate. I was working with low pixels images, and after some testing, it turned out that textsize considers every character to be 6 pixel wide, whereas an I takes max. 2 pixels and a W takes min. 8 pixels (in my case). And so, depending on my text, it was or wasn't centered at all. Though, I guess "6" was an average, so if you're working with long texts and big images, it should still be ok.

But now, if you want some real accuracy, you better use the getsize method of the font object you're going to use:

arial = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 9)
w,h = arial.getsize(msg)
draw.text(((W-w)/2,(H-h)/2), msg, font=arial, fill="black")

As used in Edilio's link.

Solution 4:

A simple solution if you're using PIL 8.0.0 or above: text anchors

width, height = # image width and height
draw = ImageDraw.draw(my_image)

draw.text((width/2, height/2), "my text", font=my_font, anchor="mm")

mm means to use the middle of the text as anchor, both horizontally and vertically.

See the anchors page for other kinds of anchoring. For example if you only want to center horizontally you may want to use ma.