Question

Pretty straightforward. I’d like to take a string like “Bananas”, slap a SpriteFont on it, and render it to a Texture2D rather than directly to the screen as SpriteBatch allows.

Can I do that? Alternatively, can I accomplish something similar with some kind of FBO-esque functionality?

Answer 1

You can use the RenderTarget2D class. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb198676.aspx
Something like this:

RenderTarget2D target = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, width,height);
GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(target);// Now the spriteBatch will render to the RenderTarget2D

spriteBatch.Begin();

spriteBatch.DrawString();//Do your stuff here

spriteBatch.End();

GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null);//This will set the spriteBatch to render to the screen again.

//If you are going to create the render target inside the Draw method, do this:
target.Dispose();