Rendertext is a Django app for using custom fonts on a web page for headings and the like without the use of Photoshop or Flash.

It does so by dynamically creating images out of text snippets. Both PNG and GIF output is currently supported.

Usage is simple. Rendertext provides the template filter rendertext which can be used like this: {{ myvar|rendertext:"grunge" }} to show myvar rendered with the font "grunge".

You can easily configure size, color and rotations. For instance, {{ myvar|rendertext:"grunge,16,#ff0000,45" }} would show the text in size 16 with color red rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise.

Behind the scenes, django-rendertext checks if the image already has been rendered. If not, the font is loaded, a new image is generated and saved to disk. Then an <img> tag is returned with the URL to the image, alt text and width and height set.

You can take a look at the documentation. Or the news to see what's changed.

Rendertext is originally based on a snippet from djangosnippets.org.

Examples

There's a simple example project you can download and play around with.

Sites using rendertext

Here are some sites using rendertext (please contact olau@iola.dk to be added):

• Talent Nord - Danish student consultancy bureau
• Rachel's and Jason's wedding site

Who's behind this?

The development so far has mostly been done by iola, a small Danish web-development house focusing on Django and jQuery.