Text Rendering

TachyPy offers multiple text paths depending on precision and dependency needs.

Text class

Text is TachyPy’s polished system-font renderer. It is the friendly public name for GLSystemText and uses FreeType + HarfBuzz when available, with an OpenGL bitmap fallback.

OpenGL text renderers

• GLText: bitmap glyph renderer in pure OpenGL.

• GLTextSDF: signed-distance-field renderer for smoother scaling.

• GLSystemText: explicit backward-compatible name for Text. You can pass a family name, comma-separated fallback list, or a direct font-file path.

The OpenGL renderers are backend-independent and do not require Pillow.

Recommended usage

• Use Text for high-quality instruction screens and overlays.

• Use GLSystemText only when you want the explicit historical class name.

• Use GLTextSDF when scalable text quality matters and shaping is simple.

• The old Pillow texture-backed constructor is backbenched as tachypy.text.LegacyText for compatibility.

HiDPI and Retina displays

On Retina displays the framebuffer has more physical pixels than logical pixels. Pass screen.content_scale so FreeType rasterizes at the correct physical resolution — otherwise text appears blurry.

label = Text("Hello", content_scale=screen.content_scale)