Question

I’ve been having a lot of trouble trying to render text in SDL with TTF to an SDL window. I’m a little new to C++ and would like this explained in a bit of a ‘newbie’ way. (with some example code, if possible?)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is a simple example. Make sure that you have arial.ttf, or your truetype font of choice in your directory. You will need to link with -lSDL -lSDL_ttf.

#include "SDL.h"
#include "SDL_ttf.h"

SDL_Surface* screen;
SDL_Surface* fontSurface;
SDL_Color fColor;
SDL_Rect fontRect;

SDL_Event Event;

TTF_Font* font;

//Initialize the font, set to white
void fontInit(){
        TTF_Init();
        font = TTF_OpenFont("arial.ttf", 12);
        fColor.r = 255;
        fColor.g = 255;
        fColor.b = 255;
}

//Print the designated string at the specified coordinates
void printF(char *c, int x, int y){
        fontSurface = TTF_RenderText_Solid(font, c, fColor);
        fontRect.x = x;
        fontRect.y = y;
        SDL_BlitSurface(fontSurface, NULL, screen, &fontRect);
        SDL_Flip(screen);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    // Initialize the SDL library with the Video subsystem
    SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO | SDL_INIT_NOPARACHUTE);

    //Create the screen
    screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(320, 480, 0, SDL_SWSURFACE);

    //Initialize fonts
    fontInit();

    //Print to center of screen
    printF("Hello World", screen->w/2 - 11*3, screen->h/2);

    do {
        // Process the events
        while (SDL_PollEvent(&Event)) {
            switch (Event.type) {

                case SDL_KEYDOWN:
                    switch (Event.key.keysym.sym) {
                    // Escape forces us to quit the app
                        case SDLK_ESCAPE:
                            Event.type = SDL_QUIT;
                        break;

                        default:
                        break;
                    }
                break;

            default:
            break;
        }
    }
    SDL_Delay(10);
    } while (Event.type != SDL_QUIT);

    // Cleanup
    SDL_Quit();

    return 0;
}