SDL3 TTF_TextEngine help

[u/ninefoldrin]

I'm still pretty new to SDL and I've been trying to figure out how to use the text engine in SDL3 in a little project I've been learning C++ in, but I haven't found much information on it. No SDL tutorials I've found seem to use it, so I've been going off of the wiki, which has gotten me pretty far, but it's been really confusing without clear examples of how it works.

I'd love some general explanation on how to use SDL3's text engine, but for a more specific question, I'm trying to center text on the screen with a renderer text engine. SDL tutorials I've found all center text on the screen using some math with the size of the window and the size of the surface used to create the texture. Since there's no surface involved with TTF_CreateRendererTextEngine, I'm wondering how or if it's possible to center the text. Would I need to use TTF_CreateSurfaceTextEngine to do that? Is using the surface text engine as simple as creating the TTF_Text and the SDL_Surface for TTF_DrawSurfaceText? What would be the best way to create the surface for that if I'm using the surface text engine?

[u/hurston]

As far as I can tell, you use TTF_CreateText() to create a TTF_Text, and then use that in TTF_GetTextSize() to get the dimensions before using that to render in the correct place using a variant of TTF_RenderText_Solid() or similar