Panda includes support for easily rendering dynamic text onscreen or in the 3-d world. It supports full use of the Unicode character set, so it can easily render international languages (including Asian languages, when used with an appropriate font).

There are three interfaces for creating text, depending on your requirements: the TextNode, which is the fundamental text-rendering class and serves as the implementation for the other two, OnscreenText, a simple high-level wrapper around TextNode, OnscreenImage, the same as OnscreenText but now for images, and DirectLabel, which integrates with the rest of the DirectGUI system.

International character sets

By default, Panda assumes the text strings you give it are formatted in the iso8859 character set, also called latin-1 on Linux. This is a standard character set that uses one byte per character and supports most Western European languages, and is likely to be the character set you're using anyway. If you have need for more characters than are supported by iso8859, you must use a more advanced encoding system like utf-8 (which may use one, two, or three bytes per character). To use utf-8, put the following in your Config.prc file:

And then make sure the strings you pass as text strings are encoded using the "utf-8" encoding method, for instance by saving your Python source files in "utf-8" (this can actually be tricky to do properly in Windows; we recommend you use a non-Microsoft editor such as Emacs or Eclipse to do this).