Inkplate 2 – Printing text

Printing text on Inkplate is simple and requires only a few functions. The library also supports custom fonts of different sizes.

To print text, use setCursor followed by print. If you're using the default font, you can use setTextSize to increase the font size:

from inkplate2 import Inkplate # Include the Inkplate module

inkplate = Inkplate() # Create an instance of the display

inkplate.begin() # Initialize the display

inkplate.setTextSize(2) # Scale up the font size

inkplate.setCursor(25,35) # Set the cursor from where the text will be written

inkplate.print("Hello world") # Print text to frame buffer

inkplate.display() # Display what is drawn to the buffer

Hello world output on display

inkplate.setTextSize()

Increases the text size by a given factor.

Returns value: None

Function parameters:

Type	Name	Description
int	s	Size factor. 1 is default size, 2 is twice as large, 3 is three times larger, etc.

inkplate.setCursor()

Move the cursor to point at given position on the screen starting from the upper left corner.

Returns value: None

Function parameters:

Type	Name	Description
int	x	X coordinate value
int	y	Y coordinate value

inkplate.print()

Prints text at the previously set cursor position. This is the standard print function.

Returns value: None

Function parameters:

Type	Name	Description
char	text	String to print on the display.

Alternative fonts example

Here we will print text using different fonts on our Inkplate board. All of the fonts are available on Inkplate-MicroPython GitHub, just upload .py file to your board and import it in your code:

from inkplate2 import Inkplate
# Import custom fonts
import FreeSerifBoldItalic_18px as SerifBoldItalic
import FreeSansBoldOblique_32px as SansBoldOblique
# Create Inkplate object
inkplate = Inkplate()

# Initialize the display
inkplate.begin()

# Set custom fonts and print example text
inkplate.setFont(SerifBoldItalic)
inkplate.print("Serif Bold Italic")

inkplate.setFont(SansBoldOblique)
inkplate.print("Sans Bold Oblique")

# Display from buffer
inkplate.display()

Custom Fonts Example

Custom Fonts

Alternatively, if you want to create your own custom font to use on your board you just take and .ttf or .otf font and turn it into a Python bytearray using the following command:

python font_to_py.py SourceSans3-Regular.ttf 20 output.py

where number 20 represents maximum font size.

ℹ️

This external python script can be found on this GitHub repo.

Example of Custom Font

from inkplate2 import Inkplate
import drippy as drippy

# Create object and initialize Inkplate
inkplate = Inkplate()
inkplate.begin()

# Set custom font and print text
inkplate.setFont(drippy)
inkplate.setTextSize(2)
inkplate.println("Drippy")

# Update the display
inkplate.display()

Drippy Custom Font Example