Rendering text with multiple lines in pygame

Question

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 g

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

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:

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 ""

---

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

import pygame

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

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()

Answer 3

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()

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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!