Text Formatting¶
The Screen’s draw.text()
method has a very rich set of methods for
position and formatting of text. Some examples:
screen.draw.text("Text color", (50, 30), color="orange")
screen.draw.text("Font name and size", (20, 100), fontname="boogaloo", fontsize=60)
screen.draw.text("Positioned text", topright=(840, 20))
screen.draw.text("Allow me to demonstrate wrapped text.", (90, 210), width=180, lineheight=1.5)
screen.draw.text("Outlined text", (400, 70), owidth=1.5, ocolor=(255,255,0), color=(0,0,0))
screen.draw.text("Drop shadow", (640, 110), shadow=(2,2), scolor="#202020")
screen.draw.text("Color gradient", (540, 170), color="red", gcolor="purple")
screen.draw.text("Transparency", (700, 240), alpha=0.1)
screen.draw.text("Vertical text", midleft=(40, 440), angle=90)
screen.draw.text("All together now:\nCombining the above options",
midbottom=(427,460), width=360, fontname="boogaloo", fontsize=48,
color="#AAFF00", gcolor="#66AA00", owidth=1.5, ocolor="black", alpha=0.8)
In its simplest usage, screen.draw.text
requires the string you want to
draw, and the position. You can either do this by passing coordinates as the
second argument (which is the top left of where the text will appear), or use
the positioning keyword arguments (described later):
screen.draw.text("hello world", (20, 100))
screen.draw.text
takes many optional keyword arguments, described below.
Font name and size¶
Fonts are loaded from a directory named fonts
, in a similar way to the
handling of images and sounds. Fonts must be in .ttf
format. For example:
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), fontname="Viga", fontsize=32)
Keyword arguments:
fontname
: filename of the font to draw. By default, use the system font.fontsize
: size of the font to use, in pixels. Defaults to24
.antialias
: whether to render with antialiasing. Defaults toTrue
.
Color and background color¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), color=(200, 200, 200), background="gray")
Keyword arguments:
color
: foreground color to use. Defaults towhite
.background
: background color to use. Defaults toNone
.
color
(as well as background
, ocolor
, scolor
, and
gcolor
) can be an (r, g, b) sequence such as (255,127,0)
, a
pygame.Color
object, a color name such as "orange"
, an HTML hex
color string such as "#FF7F00"
, or a string representing a hex color
number such as "0xFF7F00"
.
background
can also be None
, in which case the background is
transparent. Unlike pygame.font.Font.render
, it’s generally not more
efficient to set a background color when calling screen.draw.text
. So only
specify a background color if you actually want one.
Colors with alpha transparency are not supported (except for the special
case of invisible text with outlines or drop shadows - see below). See
the alpha
keyword argument for transparency.
Positioning¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", centery=50, right=300)
screen.draw.text("hello world", midtop=(400, 0))
Keyword arguments:
top left bottom right
topleft bottomleft topright bottomright
midtop midleft midbottom midright
center centerx centery
Positioning keyword arguments behave like the corresponding properties
of pygame.Rect
. Either specify two arguments, corresponding to the
horizontal and vertical positions of the box, or a single argument that
specifies both.
If the position is overspecified (e.g. both left
and right
are
given), then extra specifications will be (arbitrarily but
deterministically) discarded. For constrained text, see the section on
screen.draw.textbox
below.
Word wrap¶
screen.draw.text("splitting\nlines", (100, 100))
screen.draw.text("splitting lines", (100, 100), width=60)
Keyword arguments:
width
: maximum width of the text to draw, in pixels. Defaults toNone
.widthem
: maximum width of the text to draw, in font-based em units. Defaults toNone
.lineheight
: vertical spacing between lines, in units of the font’s default line height. Defaults to1.0
.
screen.draw.text
will always wrap lines at newline (\n
) characters. If
width
or widthem
is set, it will also try to wrap lines in order
to keep each line shorter than the given width. The text is not
guaranteed to be within the given width, because wrapping only occurs at
space characters, so if a single word is too long to fit on a line, it
will not be broken up. Outline and drop shadow are also not accounted
for, so they may extend beyond the given width.
You can prevent wrapping on a particular space with non-breaking space
characters (\u00A0
).
Text alignment¶
screen.draw.text("hello\nworld", bottomright=(500, 400), align="left")
Keyword argument:
align
: horizontal positioning of lines with respect to each other. Defaults toNone
.
align
determines how lines are positioned horizontally with respect
to each other, when more than one line is drawn. Valid values for
align
are the strings "left"
, "center"
, or "right"
, a
numerical value between 0.0
(for left alignment) and 1.0
(for
right alignment), or None
.
If align
is None
, the alignment is determined based on other arguments,
in a way that should be what you want most of the time. It depends on any
positioning arguments (topleft
, centerx
, etc.), anchor
, and finally
defaults to "left"
. I suggest you generally trust the default alignment,
and only specify align
if something doesn’t look right.
Outline¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), owidth=1, ocolor="blue")
Keyword arguments:
owidth
: outline thickness, in outline units. Defaults toNone
.ocolor
: outline color. Defaults to"black"
.
The text will be outlined if owidth
is specified. The outlining is a
crude manual method, and will probably look bad at large sizes. The
units of owidth
are chosen so that 1.0
is a good typical value
for outlines. Specifically, they’re the font size divided by 24.
As a special case, setting color
to a transparent value (e.g.
(0,0,0,0)
) while using outilnes will cause the text to be invisible,
giving a hollow outline. (This feature is not compatible with
gcolor
.)
Valid values for ocolor
are the same as for color
.
Drop shadow¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), shadow=(1.0,1.0), scolor="blue")
Keyword arguments:
shadow
: (x,y) values representing the drop shadow offset, in shadow units. Defaults toNone
.scolor
: drop shadow color. Defaults to"black"
.
The text will have a drop shadow if shadow
is specified. It must be
set to a 2-element sequence representing the x and y offsets of the drop
shadow, which can be positive, negative, or 0. For example,
shadow=(1.0,1.0)
corresponds to a shadow down and to the right of
the text. shadow=(0,-1.2)
corresponds to a shadow higher than the
text.
The units of shadow
are chosen so that 1.0
is a good typical
value for the offset. Specifically, they’re the font size divided by 18.
As a special case, setting color
to a transparent value (e.g.
(0,0,0,0)
) while using drop shadow will cause the text to be
invisible, giving a hollow shadow. (This feature is not compatible with
gcolor
.)
Valid values for scolor
are the same as for color
.
Gradient color¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), color="black", gcolor="green")
Keyword argument:
gcolor
: Lower gradient stop color. Defaults toNone
.
Specify gcolor
to color the text with a vertical color gradient. The
text’s color will be color
at the top and gcolor
at the bottom.
Positioning of the gradient stops and orientation of the gradient are
hard coded and cannot be specified.
Alpha transparency¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), alpha=0.5)
Keyword argument:
alpha
: alpha transparency value, between 0 and 1. Defaults to1.0
.
In order to maximize reuse of cached transparent surfaces, the value of
alpha
is rounded.
Anchored positioning¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), anchor=(0.3,0.7))
Keyword argument:
anchor
: a length-2 sequence of horizontal and vertical anchor fractions. Defaults to(0.0, 0.0)
.
anchor
specifies how the text is anchored to the given position,
when no positioning keyword arguments are passed. The two values in
anchor
can take arbitrary values between 0.0
and 1.0
. An
anchor
value of (0,0)
, the default, means that the given
position is the top left of the text. A value of (1,1)
means the
given position is the bottom right of the text.
Rotation¶
screen.draw.text("hello world", (100, 100), angle=10)
Keyword argument:
angle
: counterclockwise rotation angle in degrees. Defaults to0
.
Positioning of rotated surfaces is tricky. When drawing rotated text, the
anchor point, the position you actually specify, remains fixed, and the text
rotates around it. For instance, if you specify the top left of the text to be
at (100, 100)
with an angle of 90
, then the Surface will actually be
drawn so that its bottom left is at (100, 100)
.
If you find that confusing, try specifying the center. If you anchor the text at the center, then the center will remain fixed, no matter how you rotate it.
In order to maximize reuse of cached rotated surfaces, the value of
angle
is rounded to the nearest multiple of 3 degrees.
Constrained text¶
screen.draw.textbox("hello world", (100, 100, 200, 50))
screen.draw.textbox
requires two arguments: the text to be drawn, and a
pygame.Rect
or a Rect
-like object to stay within. The font size
will be chosen to be as large as possible while staying within the box.
Other than fontsize
and positional arguments, you can pass all the
same keyword arguments to screen.draw.textbox
as to screen.draw.text
.