text2img

Command line utility and (soon to be) library.

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

ARGS: Text to render

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

Basic Usage

text2img -o email.png "myemail@domain.com"

Weight

50 point font and 30% of pixels filled in

text2img -o email.png -s 50 -w 30 "myemail@domain.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 --points 12 --font DejaVu "myemail@domain.com" email.png

Read stdin

echo data.txt | text2img data.png

Alignment

echo data.txt | text2img --justify 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 ```