GD module is an interface to the GD library written by Thomas Bouttel.

gd is a graphics library. It allows your code to quickly draw images complete with lines, arcs, text, multiple colors, cut and paste from other images, and flood fills, and write out the result as a PNG or JPEG file. This is particularly useful in World Wide Web applications, where PNG and JPEG are two of the formats accepted for inline images by most browsers.

GD module [[http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/gdmodule.html|homepage]]
----
Chris Gonnerman writes:

I am the current maintainer of the Python gdmodule.
I took it over because I needed to annotate graphic images
using TrueType fonts.  The PIL (PythonImagingLibrary)
is probably superior otherwise, but the font support stinks.

There are two other projects, claimed to be PIL-compatible,
one supporting FreeType (TrueType) and the other supporting
Postscript Type 1; but when I asked here previously for 
examples and/or support using either of them I got resounding
silence.

PIL can be found at http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/index.htm

The Image-SIG's t1python module is at http://www.python.org/sigs/image-sig/t1lib/
(Incidentally this may have been updated since I first
looked at it, so my complaints here may no longer apply.)

Robert Kern's PyFT can be found at http://starship.python.net/crew/kernr/Projects.html

PIL Plus from Pythonware includes TrueType support (I've read) 
but as a commercial product it was not an option for my 
project.

I looked for the gdmodule, and discovered Richard Jones 
wasn't supporting it anymore.  When I asked about taking it
over, he answered "Sure, go ahead."

So I did.  With help from others I have updated it to support
the 2.01 (beta) libgd.  There are weaknesses, in particular
the terrible JPEG output (rule 1: always use PNG with the
gdmodule), but at least all my TTF fonts work.

gdmodule also has a very simple interface; I don't have to 
know as much about an image file to work with it.  This 
may be related to the crummy JPEG output...  I dunno.

I'd love to see sample code to render either type of fonts
via PIL and one or more of the above libraries.  In fact, 
it seems like an ideal thing for a HOWTO or some such.