from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw font = "../pil-archive/memory-error-2.ttf" s = "Test Text" f = ImageFont.truetype(font, 64, index=0, encoding="unicode") w, h = f.getsize(s) i = Image.new("RGB", (500, h), "white") d = ImageDraw.Draw(i) # this line causes a MemoryError d.text((0,0), s, font=f, fill=0) i.show()