Text & Font

The Thumby screen is small at its 0.42" size, but you can still add perfectly readable text for game dialog, menus, rules, etc - you just won't be able to comfortably fit novels of text.

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Printing Text

Text is important for communication, scores, and displaying the title of a game.

thumby.display.drawText(string, x, y, color) | draws string in color at x and y with font specified by thumby.display.setFont(...). Returns None, all parameters required.

• string
  • type: str
  • values: 128 ASCII characters
• x
  • type: int
  • values: 0 (left) ~ 71 (right)
• y
  • type: int
  • values: 0 (top) ~ 39 (bottom)
• color
  • type: int
  • values: 0 or 1

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Setting Font

You can use any font you would like with the Thumby. The default font on the Thumby is 5x7, but there is also an 8x8 font included with the Thumby software under the lib/ folder.

thumby.display.setFont(fontFilePath, width, height, space) | sets the fontFilePath pointing to binary font file with character width, height, and space between characters for use by thumby.display.drawText(...). Returns None, all parameters required.

• fontFilePath
  • type: string
  • values: 128 ASCII character string up to 256 characters long ('/' separated)
• width:
  • type: int
  • values: 0 ~ integer max
• height:
  • type: int
  • values: 0 ~ integer max
• space:
  • type: int
  • values: 0 ~ integer max

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Combined Example

This example uses both the drawText() and setFont() functions to show the appearance of the different sized fonts:

5x7 and 8x8 font text swapping back and forth on display

import thumby

thumby.display.setFPS(1)

while(1):
    thumby.display.fill(0) # Fill canvas to black
    thumby.display.setFont("/lib/font5x7.bin", 5, 7, 1)
    thumby.display.drawText("Font5x7", 5, 16, 1)
    thumby.display.update()

    thumby.display.fill(0) 
    thumby.display.setFont("/lib/font8x8.bin", 8, 8, 1)
    thumby.display.drawText("Font8x8", 5, 16, 1)
    thumby.display.update()