Table of Contents

Text Rendering

TextRenderer shapes and rasterizes scalable font text into transparent Texture2D assets. Text then uses SpriteBatch, so it shares sprite tint, depth, and coordinate behavior.

Load a font

Await font loading through AssetManager from Game.InitializeAsync:

await assets.LoadFileAsync<FontAsset>(
    "ui",
    "Assets/Inter-Regular.ttf",
    cancellationToken);

FontAssetLoader supports TrueType and OpenType input accepted by SkiaSharp.

Draw text in a scene

Inject TextRenderer, SpriteBatch, and AssetManager into the scene:

public sealed class HudScene(
    TextRenderer textRenderer,
    SpriteBatch spriteBatch,
    AssetManager assets) : BaseScene
{
    public override void Draw(double frameDelta, double frameRate)
    {
        textRenderer.Draw(
            spriteBatch,
            assets.Get<FontAsset>("ui"),
            "Score: 1200",
            fontSize: 24,
            position: new Vector2(16, 16),
            color: Color.White,
            space: CoordinateSpace.Screen,
            depth: 1f);
    }
}

Text defaults to CoordinateSpace.Screen and uses a top-left sprite origin, which suits UI placement. Select CoordinateSpace.World for labels that should pan and zoom with the camera.

Scenes already have an open sprite batch during Draw. Do not call Begin or End around TextRenderer.Draw there.

Render once, draw as a sprite

Use Render when you want to keep and transform the generated texture yourself:

Texture2D labelTexture = textRenderer.Render(font, "Ready", 36);
var label = new Sprite(labelTexture) { Origin = new Vector2(0.5f) };

spriteBatch.Draw(
    label,
    new Vector2(game.Viewport.X / 2f, 80),
    tint: Color.White,
    space: CoordinateSpace.Screen);

Text cache

TextRenderer caches by the FontAsset instance, font size, and exact text. Repeating the same combination reuses its texture. A different score string, size, or font creates another cached texture.

Prefer stable labels for frequently drawn UI. For rapidly changing text, update only when its value changes rather than calling Render speculatively. The current text cache has no per-entry eviction API, so avoid creating an unbounded stream of unique strings. Font size must be positive; text and font cannot be null.

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