Re: [pygame] Font.render() and multi-line text?

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

Stuart wrote:
> Hello People,
>
> I'm sure this is a simple question, but I was wondering if font.render can 
> handle multi-line tetx (ie: embedded \n characters) properly, or if I need to 
> split and manually re-position for each line.
>
> At present it does not seem to be managing it (\n shows up as a 'box' - ie: 
> bad character), but maybe I'm just missing something?
>
> PS: I just *LOVE* the fact that unicode is handled correctly, more font 
> libraries out there need to gain this level of competence!
hi stuart, while it's not worlds of trouble to do it yourself, awhile 
back someone put some handy code to do 'wordwrapped text output' which 
wraps text output to a rectangular area. it also handles the \n 
characters. it even does justification.

http://www.pygame.org/pcr/text_rect/index.php


if you really just need linefeed characters, something like this should 
work..

def rendertext(font, text, pos=(0,0), color=(255,255,255), bg=(0,0,0)):
    lines = text.splitlines()
    #first we need to find image size...
    width = height = 0
    for l in lines:
        width = max(width, font.size(l)[0])
        height += font.get_linesize()
    #create 8bit image for non-aa text..
    img = pygame.Surface((width, height), 0, 8)
    img.set_palette([bg, color])
    #render each line
    height = 0
    for l in lines:
        t = font.render(l, 0, color, bg)
        img.blit(t, (0, height))
        height += font.get_linesize()
    return img

you'll probably need to change this around a little for different needs. 
for example if you want antialiased fonts change the Surface call to 
Surface((width, height), SRCALPHA, 32), then no need to set a palette.