Font usage example

Support
1

Hi to all. I am developing with Inky pHAT and I need to display an icon. I would like to use font-font-awesome package from Piromoni, but I can’t find any example how to get the right icont from the font. Someone could help please?

2

I don’t understand this much so there is likely to be a better way to do this. The method I’ve got is an odd blend of using the FontAwesome python package and the FontAwesome5-Free.otf file present in Pimoroni’s fonts-python repo.

Start by installing the FontAwesome package for Python:
pip3 install fontawesome

Then, you need to install the FontAwesome font. If you need to, download the python-fonts package from Pimoroni’s Git repo:
git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/fonts-python.git

Copy FontAwesome5-Free.otf from Pimoroni’s repo into /usr/share/fonts. This essentially “installs” the font so that Python knows where to find it.

Now you can use the FontAwesome symbols to write to images:

# Set up the Inky board as appropriate, in this case an Inky Impression.
from inky.inky_uc8159 import Inky
# Initialise the Inky board
inky = Inky()

# Import the Python PIL modules for drawing the image with the symbols
from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw

# Import the FontAwesome Python package
import fontawesome as fa

# Create a font using the FontAwesome font file from Pimoroni
font = ImageFont.truetype("FontAwesome5-Free.otf", 40)


# Create a blank 600x448 pixel image to draw on, in white/ (255,255,255)
img = Image.new("RGB", (600, 448), (255,255,255))


# Convert the blank image to an ImageDraw object so it can be manipulated
drawnImage = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
# Draw an icon onto it as if it were text, in this case a paper plane, in black
drawnImage.text((30, 30), fa.icons["paper-plane"], font=font, fill=(0,0,0))

# Tell inky to use the image as the thing to be displayed
inky.set_image(img)
# Display the image
inky.show()

To choose a symbol check the list of symbols at the FontAwesome website. I’m not absolutely certain about this, but if you tick the “Free” and “Regular” filters on the left I think all of the remaining symbols will work. You just need to replace "paper-plane" in the #Draw an icon line to the name of the symbol you want to use.

EDIT: It seems that some of the Free and Solid symbols work too, but not all. This may take some trial and error.

EDIT2: Derp. The Pimoroni fonts folder has three types of FontAwesome: Free, Free-Solid and Brands. You should be able to get the corresponding symbols by importing those instread of just Free.