Crazy as this sounds, I had to to almost the exact same thing recently. I too used Imager. Not only did my images need text in exact locations, but they also needed certain markings, etc. Here's how I did it:

• First create a tiff of the desired size with any needed markings, at 600 dpi and black and white mode.
• In perl, use Imager to open that image, create a font, and then write to it in the specified coordinates. Something like:

  my $img = Imager->new();
  $img->open( file => '/path/to/tiff/file' );
  my $color = Imager::Color->new("#000000");
  my $font = Imager::Font->new(
      file    => '/path/to/ttf/font',
      color   => $color,
  );
  $img->string(
    text    => $stuff_to_write,
    x       => $x,
    y       => $y,
    font    => $font,
  );
  [download]

My project also had the requirement that each letter of each word need to be in a certain place, so I just had a wrapper sub that would take a word and the x/y coords, split the word into individual letters and then use a 'spacing' var to increment the x value and print each letter one by one.

HTH

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