python - Chinese unicode fonts in PyGame

Question

How can I display Chinese characters in PyGame? And what's a good free/libre font to use for this purpose?

Answer 1

pygame uses SDL_ttf for rendering, so you should be in fine shape as rendering goes.

unifont.org appears to have some extensive resources on Open-Source fonts for a range of scripts.

I grabbed the Cyberbit pan-unicode font and extracted the encluded ttf. The folowing 'worked on my machine' which is a Windows Vista Home Basic and Python 2.6:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import pygame, sys


unistr = u"黒澤 明"
pygame.font.init()
srf = pygame.display.set_mode((640,480))
f = pygame.font.Font("Cyberbit.ttf",20)
srf.blit(f.render(unistr,True,(0,0,0)),(0,0))
pygame.display.flip()

while True:
    srf.blit(f.render(unistr,True,(255,255,255)),(0,0))
    for e in pygame.event.get():
        if e.type == pygame.QUIT:
            pygame.quit()
            sys.exit()

As long as you're just displaying unicode text, you should be in fantastic shape. If, however, you want to actually read unicode input from the user, the situation is much more bleak. Pygame has no input methods of any sort.