Stickers from text

I love the idea of being able to easily add branded text stickers (branded in color and font) to social media images. However, creating them can be a pain. You can always type text, but making it into something pretty requires masking or using an editor, like Canva, that may then own your images - er, text images.

So, I created a simple bash script that will take an array of text and create masked transparent images as output.

Here, I’ve created a directory structure on my Desktop

• Desktop
  • texts
  • source
    • overlays
    • masks
      • text

echo "Starting Texts"
mainDir="${HOME}/Desktop"
sourceDir="${mainDir}/source"
maskDir="${mainDir}/source/masks/text"
overlayDir="${mainDir}/source/overlays"
textDir="${mainDir}/texts"

function makeTextMask {
  convert -size 1000x1000  -fill black -background white -strokewidth 1 -stroke black \
        -font Chalkduster -gravity center caption:"${2}"  +repage \
        -gravity Center $maskDir/mask$1.png
}

function makePrettyText {
  echo 'I am making texts from' $1
  title=${1##*/}
  title=${title%.*}
  MASKS=$maskDir/*
  n=0
  for m in $MASKS
    do
      convert $m -size 2400x2400 \
              tile:$1  \
              -compose Screen -composite -alpha on -transparent white $textDir/$title$n.png
      let n++
    done
}


# ensure we have the right dirs
if [ ! -e "${textDir}" ]; then
  mkdir $textDir
fi

STRINGS=("HAPPY" "SUPER" "#IRL" "perfect" "chill\nout" "(^o^)")
x=0
for lbl in "${STRINGS[@]}"
  do
    makeTextMask $x "${lbl}"
    let x++
  done

BACKS=$sourceDir/backs/*
for i in $BACKS
  do
    makePrettyText $i
  done

This script, I save as ‘make_stickers.sh’ and I can call it from my terminal like so:

jess:~/ $ make_stickers.sh        

It is straightforward to change the string array to be an argument of the function and not have to edit the function constantly.