Question

In C# XNA how is a single character drawn onto a Texture2D instead of the sprite batch ? I wish to do this in order to fill a bool[,] with the characters char\background data to analyze its shape.

Answer 1

You could use a render target. The basic idea is instead of rendering your text to the back buffer, you render to a separate buffer, which can then give you a Texture2D.

See here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xna.framework.graphics.rendertarget(v=xnagamestudio.31).aspx

question asker edit:

With permission I’ve added to this answer. At time of writing the information on the MSDN is very out of date and makes it look more complicated than it need so I wrote my own example of how to do this.

The class this is done in may have to inherit from IDisposable and implement void Dispose() which does nothing.

PresentationParameters pp = graphicsDevice.PresentationParameters;
byte width = 20, height = 20; // for example

// pp.BackBufferWidth, pp.BackBufferHeight // for auto x and y sizes
RenderTarget2D render_target = new RenderTarget2D(graphicsDevice,
width, height, false, pp.BackBufferFormat, pp.DepthStencilFormat,
pp.MultiSampleCount, RenderTargetUsage.DiscardContents);

graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(render_target);
graphicsDevice.Clear(...); // possibly optional
spriteBatch.Begin();
// draw to the spriteBatch
spriteBatch.End();
graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); // Otherwise the SpriteBatch can't
// be used as a texture, this may also need to be done before using the
// SpriteBatch normally again to render to the screen.

// render_target can now be used as a Texture2D

At which point this might be useful. http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series2D/Texture_to_Colors.php