Pil Text Generator

What it is#

Pil Text Generator (pil-discord-txt) takes a string and renders it as a PNG with whatever font and color you pick. I originally made it so I could post styled text in Discord without paying for Nitro formatting.

The core rendering logic lives in textimg.py, and main.py wraps it in a FastAPI server.

How it works#

gen(text, color, font) does the rendering:

1. Load a TrueType font from fontDict — 10 Korean fonts (Nanum Gothic, Lotte Mart Dream, Gugi, IBM Plex Sans KR, Seoul Namsan, Spoqa Han Sans Neo, etc.)
2. Measure text size with font.getsize(), create a transparent RGBA canvas
3. Draw with ImageDraw.text() — white/colored fill, 3 px stroke outline, anchored right-middle (anchor="rm")
4. Save to pil_text.png

Colors live in colorDict — each entry has a stroke and color tuple. Options include original (Discord dark-theme white-on-gray stroke), blurple / blurple_old (the two Discord purples), plus red/green/yellow/blue/pink/grey/white/black.

The API#

FastAPI app, version 0.1.5:

GET /{text}?font=nanum&color=original

• Max 10 characters — longer text returns an error image (10자 까지만 허용)
• Invalid font/color combo → 요청이 잘못되었습니다.
• Returns the PNG directly via FileResponse
• Shortcut route GET /g/{text} redirects to the query-param version

Runs on uvicorn port 8080. Managed with Poetry (pyproject.toml).

There’s also dctxt2img-client — a bare-bones HTML frontend that hits the API — but honestly the generator itself is the interesting part.

Why Pillow#

Discord messages are plain text. I wanted something that looked like a designed card — custom fonts, stroke outlines, transparent background — without opening Figma every time. Pillow’s stroke_width + stroke_fill params made the outlined text effect trivial once the font files were in place.

It’s a small tool, but I used it constantly for a while. These days Discord has more native formatting, but the API still runs if you need it.