Simple way to display text on screen in Python?

Question

I\'ve been googling and looking through StackOverflow but no luck...

What I would like is to display text to the screen (not console) for an art project I am develop

Answer 1

You can easily do this sort of thing with Tkinter, which is included in most modern Python installations. Eg,

import tkinter as tk
from random import seed, choice
from string import ascii_letters

seed(42)

colors = ('red', 'yellow', 'green', 'cyan', 'blue', 'magenta')
def do_stuff():
    s = ''.join([choice(ascii_letters) for i in range(10)])
    color = choice(colors)
    l.config(text=s, fg=color)
    root.after(100, do_stuff)

root = tk.Tk()
root.wm_overrideredirect(True)
root.geometry("{0}x{1}+0+0".format(root.winfo_screenwidth(), root.winfo_screenheight()))
root.bind("<Button-1>", lambda evt: root.destroy())

l = tk.Label(text='', font=("Helvetica", 60))
l.pack(expand=True)

do_stuff()
root.mainloop()

Click with the left mouse button to exit.

This is just a proof of concept. To control color &/or font on a letter-by-letter basis you'll need to do something a little more complicated. You could use a row of Label widgets (one for each letter), or you could use a Text widget.

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However, if you try this on a Mac, the window may not receive focus, as mentioned here. The answers here show an alternative way to get a fullscreen window, but I suspect it could suffer from the same defect.

root.attributes("-fullscreen", True)

One advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require the root.geometry call.

Answer 2

Here's a pygame solution. Just pass the random letters and color to Font.render and then blit the returned surface. To center it I call the get_rect method of the txt surface and pass the center of the screen_rect as the center argument. Note that you can't choose a different color for each letter. To do that you would probably have to render several "one letter" surfaces and then combine them.

Epilepsy warning - The text was getting changed really quickly (each frame (30 fps)) and I wasn't sure if that could cause epileptic seizures, so I added a timer to update the text only every 10 frames. Be careful if you want to increase the update speed.

import sys
from random import choice, randrange
from string import ascii_letters

import pygame as pg


def random_letters(n):
    """Pick n random letters."""
    return ''.join(choice(ascii_letters) for _ in range(n))


def main():
    info = pg.display.Info()
    screen = pg.display.set_mode((info.current_w, info.current_h), pg.FULLSCREEN)
    screen_rect = screen.get_rect()
    font = pg.font.Font(None, 45)
    clock = pg.time.Clock()
    color = (randrange(256), randrange(256), randrange(256))
    txt = font.render(random_letters(randrange(5, 21)), True, color)
    timer = 10
    done = False

    while not done:
        for event in pg.event.get():
            if event.type == pg.KEYDOWN:
                if event.key == pg.K_ESCAPE:
                    done = True

        timer -= 1
        # Update the text surface and color every 10 frames.
        if timer <= 0:
            timer = 10
            color = (randrange(256), randrange(256), randrange(256))
            txt = font.render(random_letters(randrange(5, 21)), True, color)

        screen.fill((30, 30, 30))
        screen.blit(txt, txt.get_rect(center=screen_rect.center))

        pg.display.flip()
        clock.tick(30)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    pg.init()
    main()
    pg.quit()
    sys.exit()