To wit: Notepad is opened, the font selected as “Arial, Size 11”, the words
“this is just a test” carefully entered, a screenshot taken:

The following Python code is entered and run:

import ImageFont, ImageDraw, Image
im = Image.open("c:/textimg.png") #the above image

pilfont = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 11)

compimg = Image.new("RGB", im.size, (255, 255, 255))
draw = ImageDraw.Draw(compimg)

draw.text((0,0), "this is just a test", (0,0,0), font=pilfont)

compimg.save("c:/compimg.png")

Yet the result is disappointingly different:

Not only is it the wrong size, but it’s also slightly shaded, whereas the
notepad rendering is crisp and crosses no pixel boundaries.

How can I get it to render like notepad does? I’ve had this exact issue with
pygame as well, so I think I’m missing some fundamental understanding about
TTF here.

UPDATE: I tried it with pygame again. It does the same thing. It does have an
option to turn off anti-aliasing but it looks like it just lops off whatever
pixels it would have antialiased based on some threshold. The closest
approximation I got was using size 15. The code was:

pygfont = pygame.font.Font(r"c:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf", 15)
surf = pygfont.render("this is just a test", False, (0,0,0), (255,255,255))
pygame.image.save(surf, r"c:\pygameimg.png")

and the result (notepad original on top for comparison):

KILL ME http://tinypic.com/images/404.gif

Gah why can’t I offer a bounty right away?

UPDATE: here’s comparing all the methods:

PIL 15, then notepad 11, then pygame 15 anti-alias-off, then pygame 15 anti-
alias-on.

PIL 15 actually has the right proportions, it’s just anti-aliased. so: why 15
vs. 11? how to make it do it the same way windows does? (and wtf is pygame
doing?)