text.md

title	Text
summary	Easily position and style text anywhere on the screen, great for menus, labels, and on-screen messages.
icon	text_fields

Introduction

The text drawing functions provide a way to render text across all drawing surfaces in Badgeware. It ensures consistent behavior whether you’re displaying on the main screen, working with images, or composing scenes off-screen, allowing flexible and efficient text rendering throughout your application.

Loading fonts

Before you can write to the screen you must load a font. Loading a font is a relatively expensive operation so you probably want to preload any fonts you plan to use at the start of your program, you can then swap between them by assigning the font property of your screen.

nope_font = rom_font.nope
compass_font = rom_font.compass

def update():
  screen.pen = color.navy
  screen.clear()

  screen.pen = color.white

  screen.font = nope_font
  screen.text("this is nope", 10, 10)

  screen.font = compass_font
  screen.text("this is compass", 10, 30)

Badgeware ships with a gorgeous set of thirty licensed bitmap fonts designed by https://somepx.itch.io - you are free to use them in your projects!

Brushes and color

Drawing text uses the currently selected brush. This lets you colour text and also implement effects like drop shadows.

def shadow_text(message, x, y):
  # draw the shadow offset by 1 pixel
  screen.pen = color.rgb(0, 0, 0, 128)
  screen.text(message, x + 1, y + 1)

  # draw the text
  screen.pen = color.rgb(255, 255, 255)
  screen.text(message, x, y)

def update():
  shadow_text("Hello, Badgeware!", 10, 10)

Many effects can be achieved including bolding text, shadows, outlines, and even gradients.