Building PIL with Freetype2 on Snow Leopard
7 July 2011
13:25
I had some trouble getting the venerable Python Imaging Library (PIL) compiled with the Freetype feature on Mac OS X 10.6. Doing a simple pip install
or easy_install
will build it with just the basic options. But if you need to generate Captchas and the like (with django-simple-captcha, for example) you'll need the Freetype option, too.
In fact, OS X comes with Freetype2 installed (as part of the X11 package), just not in a location the PIL build script knows about. That is simple to fix, however:
$ cd ~/Downloads $ curl -LO http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.7.tar.gz $ tar -zxf Imaging-1.1.7.tar.gz $ cd Imaging-1.1.7 $ echo 'FREETYPE_ROOT = "/usr/X11/lib", "/usr/X11/include"' > setup_site.py $ python setup.py build
The setup summary printed out at the end of the build should now say “FREETYPE2 support available”, which would mean this procedure worked as designed.
Reactions
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Alex Clark says:
9 July 2011
00:21Alternatively, you can easy_install Pillow (PIL fork that has X11 paths in setup.py)
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Dean Powell says:
21 November 2011
23:43Hi Alex,
I wanted to thank you for your suggestion on installing 'Pillow' instead of just installing 'PIL'.
I just ran this command:$ pip install Pillow
And it worked great.
Thanks again -
Nash says:
28 March 2012
20:50Works perfectly! I did have trouble at first insofar as "import _imaging" would fail, but I tracked that down to a problem with libjpeg so I re-built libjpeg using gcc-4.0, re-installed PIL, and it's all working like a charm now. Thanks! Nash