A simple Python script for making pretty “screenshorts,” “tweet shots,” and “text shots” for social media posting.

“Screenshorts” are a popular way to embed “preview” text of articles in social media posts. pyscreenshort was inspired by apps and features like OneShot, Instapaper, and Medium that make it easy to generate these images on certain devices and services. Though not as straightforward to use, pyscreenshort is an experiment in using Python to generate consistent (and hopefully attractive!) images like these. It takes as inspiration Instagram’s attractive formatting, as well as the style used by The New York Times in many of their tweets.

Run screenshort.py to use. The first input will be used as your image’s primary text. If provided, a second input will be used as the “secondary” text in the lower left corner. An example that will produce a two-line image with secondary text:

./screenshort.py \
  $'This is a trial of pyscreenshort.\nIt is a Python project for creating attractive “screenshorts” from whatever text you provide.' \
  micahlanier.github.io/pyscreenshort \
  --bg_color=white \
  --padding=40 \
  --main_text_color=black \
  --main_font_name='Hoefler Text' \
  --main_font_size=32 \
  --secondary_text_color=#999 \
  --output screenshort.png

The result of the above will be written to a PNG file. pyscreenshort will automatically wrap text where appropriate. To manually include newline characters, use syntax like above (if using bash) or wrap your text in double quotation marks.

Finally, run screenshort.py -h for a list of additional formatting options, including image size, colors, and fonts.

Note: The current version of this software looks for fonts where they are expected to be found on Mac OS X. Source modification may be necessary for other systems.

pyscreenshort uses several typical Python packages, as well as Pillow 2.7.