Command line utility and (soon to be) library.

Banner created using

text2img -o text2img.png -s 80 -w 30 "Text 2 Image"

Install Command Line App

cargo install text2img

Summary

Creates a png image from text, with an easy to use command line tool and/or library.

The idea is to be able to show sensitive information and defeat Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Useful to protect text from bots and scrapers, such as email addresses and telephone numbers in web pages, and even passwords or tokens sent via email.

The image size is calculated automatically so that the text fits, with a small margin. The background is transparent so that the image can be used on any color background.

Options

You can change the font size (-s) also to make it harder for bots and scrapers to do OCR on the text there is an option (-w) to only fill in a percentage of the pixels at random.

If the text has spaces it must be put in quotes on the command line.

Help

USAGE:
text2img [OPTIONS] --output <OUTPUT> <TEXT>

ARGS:
<TEXT>    Text to render

OPTIONS:
-h, --help               Print help information
-o, --output <OUTPUT>    Output filename. Currently only png format is supported
-s, --size <SIZE>        Point size of text [default: 20]
-V, --version            Print version information
-w, --weight <WEIGHT>    Weight 1 to 100 [default: 100]

Basic Usage

text2img -o email.png myemail@example.com

Font size

50 point font

text2img -o email_size50.png -s 50 myemail@example.com

Weight

30% of pixels filled in.

Note: you probably want to make the font bigger so that the text is easier to read.

text2img -o email_weight30.png -w 30 -s 80 myemail@example.com

Font

Currently only Roboto is supported.

The Roboto font used was copied from

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/unhinted/RobotoTTF/Roboto-Regular.ttf

Roadmap - Ideas for next version

Submit an issue if you would like a feature, or send a PR if you would like to contribute.

Poisson Disks

Render the text using Poisson Disks to make it even harder for OCR to work.

Background color

Currently the background is always transparent.

Change Font

text2img -s 12 --font DejaVu -o email.png "myemail@example.com"

Read stdin

echo data.txt | text2img -o data.png

Alignment

echo data.txt | text2img --justify -o data.png --center --left --right

Alternatives to this crate

The alternatives given require the output image size to be specified.

text2image from the Tesseract project

text2image

ImageMagick

convert -size 360x360 xc:white -font "FreeMono" -pointsize 12 -fill black -draw @ascii.txt image.png

file ascii.txt:

text 15,15 "                 text to show
"

convert -size 360x360 xc:white -font "FreeMono" -pointsize 12 -fill black -annotate +15+15 "@ascii.txt" image.png

convert -list font | grep Font:

#!/bin/sh

$1 | convert -background black -fill white \
-font Helvetica -pointsize 14 \
-border 10 -bordercolor black \
label:@- $2