6. Fonts

Pygame supports text rendering with TrueType fonts.

Font rendering consists of two steps. First you need to load a font with correct size. This is needed to be done only once per font and size combination. Note that Pygame can’t change font size dynamically. To change the font size you need to load the font with the correct size.

Note

I recommend to download a font file to your game assets and loading it from there. It guarantees that others will have your font as well without a need to install it into system fonts.

import sys
import pygame

pygame.init()
window = pygame.display.set_mode((640, 480))
clock = pygame.time.Clock()

sysfont = pygame.font.SysFont(pygame.font.get_default_font(), 32)
custom_font = pygame.font.Font("myfont.ttf", 32)

while True:
    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
            sys.exit()

    sysfont_surface = sysfont.render("Welcome", False, (255, 255, 255))
    customfont_surface = custom_font.render("Welcome", False, (255, 255, 255))

    window.fill((0, 0, 0))

    window.blit(sysfont_surface, (10, 10))
    window.blit(customfont_surface, (10, 50))


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

In the example above sysfont is system font that Pygame tries to find for you. custom_font is any TrueType font copied or downloaded from internet.

Note that font size when loading the font is given in points and not in pixels. The following table lists some sizes. You can find similar tables from internet.

Points	Pixels
6pt	8px
6.75pt	9px
7.5pt	10px
8.25pt	11px
9pt	12px
9.75pt	13px
10.5pt	14px
11.25pt	15px
12pt	16px
12.75pt	17px
13.5pt	18px
14.25pt	19px
15pt	20px
15.75pt	21px
16.5pt	22px
17.25pt	23px
18pt	24px
18.75pt	25px