Rendering text with multiple lines in pygame

I am trying to make a game and I am trying to render a lot of text. When the text renders, the rest of the text goes off the screen. Is there any easy way to make the text go to the next line of the pygame window?

helpT = sys_font.render 
                ("This game is a combination of all of the trendsn of 2016. When you press 'Start Game,' a menu will pop up. In order to beat the game, you must get a perfect score on every single one of these games.",0,(hecolor))
        screen.blit(helpT,(0, 0))

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

As I said in the comments; you have to render each word separately and calculate if the width of the text extends the width of the surface (or screen). Here’s an example:

import pygame
pygame.init()


SIZE = WIDTH, HEIGHT = (1024, 720)
FPS = 30
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(SIZE, pygame.RESIZABLE)
clock = pygame.time.Clock()


def blit_text(surface, text, pos, font, color=pygame.Color('black')):
    words = [word.split(' ') for word in text.splitlines()]  # 2D array where each row is a list of words.
    space = font.size(' ')[0]  # The width of a space.
    max_width, max_height = surface.get_size()
    x, y = pos
    for line in words:
        for word in line:
            word_surface = font.render(word, 0, color)
            word_width, word_height = word_surface.get_size()
            if x + word_width >= max_width:
                x = pos[0]  # Reset the x.
                y += word_height  # Start on new row.
            surface.blit(word_surface, (x, y))
            x += word_width + space
        x = pos[0]  # Reset the x.
        y += word_height  # Start on new row.


text = "This is a really long sentence with a couple of breaks.nSometimes it will break even if there isn't a break " 
       "in the sentence, but that's because the text is too long to fit the screen.nIt can look strange sometimes.n" 
       "This function doesn't check if the text is too high to fit on the height of the surface though, so sometimes " 
       "text will disappear underneath the surface"
font = pygame.font.SysFont('Arial', 64)

while True:

    dt = clock.tick(FPS) / 1000

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            quit()

    screen.fill(pygame.Color('white'))
    blit_text(screen, text, (20, 20), font)
    pygame.display.update()

Result

Method 2

There is no easy way to render text on multiple lines in pygame, but this helper function could provide some use to you. Just pass in your text (with newlines), x, y, and font size.

def render_multi_line(text, x, y, fsize)
        lines = text.splitlines()
        for i, l in enumerate(lines):
            screen.blit(sys_font.render(l, 0, hecolor), (x, y + fsize*i))

Method 3

This will be similar to what others have posted, but I figured I’d upload my own code too:

    def box_text(surface, font, x_start, x_end, y_start, text, colour):
        x = x_start
        y = y_start
        words = text.split(' ')

        for word in words:
            word_t = font.render(word, True, colour)
            if word_t.get_width() + x <= x_end:
                surface.blit(word_t, (x, y))
                x += word_t.get_width() + 2
            else:
                y += word_t.get_height() + 4
                x = x_start
                surface.blit(word_t, (x, y))
                x += word_t.get_width() + 2

I think it’s pretty self explanatory, you enter where you want your text to start (x_start) and where it should end, and then it pretty much goes down until your entered String is done.

An example of when I used in a personal project:

x_start = self.W / 2 - info_box.get_width() / 2 + 10

self.box_text(self.WINDOW, self.info_font, x_start, x_start + 430, self.H / 3 + 10, self.mage_text, self.white)

You would have to do some minor changes if you want the text to be justified though.

Method 4

This is how I did it

amfolyt_beskrivelse_text = ['en amfolyt er et stof som både kan være en base, eller syre','så som']
    for x in amfolyt_beskrivelse_text:
        descriptioncounter += 1
        screen.blit((pygame.font.SysFont('constantia',12).render(x, True, BLACK)),(300,10*descriptioncounter))
    descriptioncounter = 0

but of course, I can only do that because my text starts a line distance from the top of the screen. If you start further down the screen you could do

(300,12+12*descriptioncounter)

Method 5

I recommend the ptext library which is able to recognize newline (n) characters. You only need to call ptext.draw(text, position).

import pygame as pg
import ptext


pg.init()
screen = pg.display.set_mode((640, 480))
clock = pg.time.Clock()
BG_COLOR = pg.Color('gray12')
BLUE = pg.Color('dodgerblue')
# Triple quoted strings contain newline characters.
text = """Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris
nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in
reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."""

done = False
while not done:
    for event in pg.event.get():
        if event.type == pg.QUIT:
            done = True

    screen.fill(BG_COLOR)
    ptext.draw(text, (10, 10), color=BLUE)  # Recognizes newline characters.
    pg.display.flip()
    clock.tick(60)

pg.quit()

Method 6

Created this function that could help a bit 🙂 Just make sure that each new paragraph is a new item on the list you are calling on this function.

def multilineText(Surface, textAsList: list, font: str, size: int, colour, antialias: bool, centerTupleCoord: tuple, spaceBetweenLines: int):
    xPosition = centerTupleCoord[0]
    yPosition = centerTupleCoord[1]
    for paragraph in textAsList:
        fontObjsrt = pygame.font.SysFont(font, size)
        TextSurf = fontObjsrt.render(paragraph, antialias, colour)
        TextRect = TextSurf.get_rect()
        TextRect.center = (xPosition, yPosition)
        Surface.blit(TextSurf, TextRect)
        yPosition += spaceBetweenLines

Method 7

There is no automatic solution. You have to implement the text wrap by yourself and draw the text line by line respectively word by word.
Fortunately PyGame wiki provides a function that for this task. See PyGame wiki Simple Text Wrapping for pygame.

I’ve extended the function and added an additional argument, which provides left or right aligned text, centerd text or even block mode.

Minimal example: repl.it/@Rabbid76/PyGame-TextWrap

import pygame

pygame.init()
font = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 40)

textAlignLeft = 0
textAlignRight = 1
textAlignCenter = 2
textAlignBlock = 3

def drawText(surface, text, color, rect, font, align=textAlignLeft, aa=False, bkg=None):
    lineSpacing = -2
    spaceWidth, fontHeight = font.size(" ")[0], font.size("Tg")[1]

    listOfWords = text.split(" ")
    if bkg:
        imageList = [font.render(word, 1, color, bkg) for word in listOfWords]
        for image in imageList: image.set_colorkey(bkg)
    else:
        imageList = [font.render(word, aa, color) for word in listOfWords]

    maxLen = rect[2]
    lineLenList = [0]
    lineList = [[]]
    for image in imageList:
        width = image.get_width()
        lineLen = lineLenList[-1] + len(lineList[-1]) * spaceWidth + width
        if len(lineList[-1]) == 0 or lineLen <= maxLen:
            lineLenList[-1] += width
            lineList[-1].append(image)
        else:
            lineLenList.append(width)
            lineList.append([image])

    lineBottom = rect[1]
    lastLine = 0
    for lineLen, lineImages in zip(lineLenList, lineList):
        lineLeft = rect[0]
        if align == textAlignRight:
            lineLeft += + rect[2] - lineLen - spaceWidth * (len(lineImages)-1)
        elif align == textAlignCenter:
            lineLeft += (rect[2] - lineLen - spaceWidth * (len(lineImages)-1)) // 2
        elif align == textAlignBlock and len(lineImages) > 1:
            spaceWidth = (rect[2] - lineLen) // (len(lineImages)-1)
        if lineBottom + fontHeight > rect[1] + rect[3]:
            break
        lastLine += 1
        for i, image in enumerate(lineImages):
            x, y = lineLeft + i*spaceWidth, lineBottom
            surface.blit(image, (round(x), y))
            lineLeft += image.get_width() 
        lineBottom += fontHeight + lineSpacing

    if lastLine < len(lineList):
        drawWords = sum([len(lineList[i]) for i in range(lastLine)])
        remainingText = ""
        for text in listOfWords[drawWords:]: remainingText += text + " "
        return remainingText
    return ""

msg = "Simple function that will draw text and wrap it to fit the rect passed.  If there is any text that will not fit into the box, the remaining text will be returned."
textRect = pygame.Rect(100, 100, 300, 300)

window = pygame.display.set_mode((500, 500))
run = True
while run:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            run = False

    window.fill((255, 255, 255))
    pygame.draw.rect(window, (0, 0, 0), textRect, 1)
    drawTextRect = textRect.inflate(-5, -5)
    drawText(window, msg, (0, 0, 0), drawTextRect, font, textAlignBlock, True)
    pygame.display.flip()

pygame.quit()
exit()

Method 8

One thing you could do is use a monospaced font. They have the same size for all characters and so are beloved by programmers. That’s going to be my solution for handling the height/width problem.

Method 9

You could use a .json file to load each line.

.json file (called first.json):

["Hello!", "How's it going?"]

And then load it into the file:

sys_font = pygame.font.SysFont(("Arial"),30)

def message_box(text):
    pos = 560 # depends on message box location
    pygame.draw.rect(root, (0,0,0), (100, 550, 800, 200)) #rectangle position varies
    for x in range(len(text)):
        rendered = sys_font.render(text[x], 0, (255,255,255))
        root.blit(rendered, ( 110, pos))
        pos += 30 # moves the following line down 30 pixels

with open('first.json') as text:
    message_box(json.load(text))

Don’t forget to import json

Result:

Hope this helps!

Method 10

Building on previous answers I made a somewhat comprehensive blit text function I can use with a single short command:

def blittext(text, **kwargs):
    #blit text into screen, uses defaults and works for multiline strings
    fontface = kwargs.get('font', 'PressStart2P-Regular.ttf')
    b = kwargs.get('bold', False)
    fontsize = kwargs.get('size', 30)
    color = kwargs.get('color', (255, 255, 255))
    topleft = kwargs.get('topleft',(w/2,h/2))
    center = kwargs.get('center')
    textsurf = kwargs.get('surface',surface)
    maxwidth = kwargs.get('width',w)
    try:
        myfont = pygame.font.Font('/storage/emulated/0/games/' + fontface, fontsize)
    except:
        myfont = pygame.font.SysFont(fontface, fontsize, bold=b)
    x,y = topleft
    charwidth = myfont.size(' ')[0]
    charheight = fontsize + 3
    
    if center:
        for l in text.splitlines():
            mytext = myfont.render(l, False, color)
            textrect = mytext.get_rect(center=center)
            center = (center[0],center[1]+charheight)
            textsurf.blit(mytext,textrect)      
    else:
        for line in text.splitlines():
            for word in line.split(' '):
                mytext = myfont.render(word, False, color)
                textrect = mytext.get_rect(topleft=(x,y))
                wordwidth = textrect.width
                if x + wordwidth >= maxwidth:
                    x,y = (topleft[0], y + charheight)
                textsurf.blit(mytext,(x,y))
                x += charwidth + wordwidth
            x,y = (topleft[0], y + charheight)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0