pygame - How to display text with font & color?

Is there a way I can display text on a pygame window using python?

I need to display a bunch of live information that updates and would rather not make an image for each character I need.

Can I blit text to the screen?

Solution 1:

Yes. It is possible to draw text in pygame:

# initialize font; must be called after 'pygame.init()' to avoid 'Font not Initialized' error
myfont = pygame.font.SysFont("monospace", 15)

# render text
label = myfont.render("Some text!", 1, (255,255,0))
screen.blit(label, (100, 100))

Solution 2:

You can use your own custom fonts by setting the font path using pygame.font.Font

pygame.font.Font(filename, size): return Font

example:

pygame.font.init()
font_path = "./fonts/newfont.ttf"
font_size = 32
fontObj = pygame.font.Font(font_path, font_size)

Then render the font using fontObj.render and blit to a surface as in veiset's answer above. :)

Solution 3:

I have some code in my game that displays live score. It is in a function for quick access.

def texts(score):
   font=pygame.font.Font(None,30)
   scoretext=font.render("Score:"+str(score), 1,(255,255,255))
   screen.blit(scoretext, (500, 457))

and I call it using this in my while loop:

texts(score)

Solution 4:

I wrote a wrapper, that will cache text surfaces, only re-render when dirty. googlecode/ninmonkey/nin.text/demo/