Why am I hitting a small character limit when rendering with SDL_TTF?

Question

I'm making a text based game using SDL2 and SDL_TTF. I just started working with TTF, and I've noticed there is some kind of character limit regarding how much text you can render at a time! I can only render about 15 characters, after that, (16 characters or higher) the screen is just blank.

I really want to render large bodies of text (multiple sentences at a time) so how do I overcome this issue? For rendering text, I have this function:

void drawDialog(const char* content) {
    //Draws a dialog box with set text

    TTF_Font* font = TTF_OpenFont("assets/times.ttf", 900);
    SDL_Color textColor = { 255, 255, 255 };
    SDL_Surface* message = TTF_RenderText_Solid(font, content, textColor);
    SDL_Texture* tex;

    SDL_Rect destRect;

    destRect.x = 50;
    destRect.y = 730;

    destRect.w = 200;
    destRect.h = 30;

    tex = SDL_CreateTextureFromSurface(renderer, message);
    SDL_FreeSurface(message);
    SDL_RenderCopy(renderer, tex, NULL, &destRect);
    SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);
}

So, any advice for overcoming this limit? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You're probably running into surface/texture size issues, since you're loading the font in a massive size (900). I'd suggest using a much smaller point size, and that should look just as good as you don't necessarily need to downscale it at all.

I render fonts with sizes around 30 for smaller text, and around 50 for larger menu text.