SDL2ttf

SDL2ttf, commonly referred to as SDL2_ttf, is a separate library that adds TrueType font rendering support to the SDL 2 multimedia framework. It is built on top of the FreeType font rasterizer and provides text rendering capabilities for applications using SDL2, enabling fonts to be loaded from TrueType files and rendered to surfaces or textures.

The library offers font loading and metric querying, allowing programs to open a font file at a specified size and query font metrics such as height and ascent. It supports rendering text in multiple styles, including solid, blended, and wrapped variants. SDL2_ttf uses FreeType to rasterize glyphs and can handle Unicode input when UTF-8 text is supplied to its rendering routines, making it suitable for multilingual applications.

Common usage involves initializing the library with TTF_Init, loading a font via TTF_OpenFont, and rendering text through functions like TTF_RenderText_Solid, TTF_RenderText_Blended, or TTF_RenderText_Blended_Wrapped. When using SDL2’s renderer API, rendered surfaces can be converted to textures with SDL_CreateTextureFromSurface for efficient hardware-accelerated rendering. Proper resource management includes closing fonts with TTF_CloseFont and quitting the library with TTF_Quit.

SDL2_ttf requires the FreeType library and is designed to be cross-platform, functioning on Windows, macOS, Linux, and other SDL2-supported targets. It is distributed under the same permissive license as SDL, and is maintained as part of the SDL ecosystem. For more information, see SDL and FreeType project documentation.