Word of warning, make sure the call to display a new text string only happens once *not* per frame, in my script I check to see if the text identifier is nil before the call to ensure it only happens once. Also make sure to call the delete function when the text is done with.
If you start to see a drop in frame rate then the most likely cause is a repetitive call to create text as under the covers that will keep generating new character sprites and will eventually cause a crash when the sprite storage is full.
If you want to practice making your own sprites here are a couple different raw 'fonts' to play with.
You need to work out the best height for the characters then chop up the font image into separate pngs for each character you want to use. You don't need to use all of the characters btw, if you were creating a numerical display for example you would only need the numbers.
Make sure to make all the images the same height and that the characters are correctly positioned within the image, i.e. such that when placed side by side the characters line up properly. Then make the images as narrow as possible whilst still having a small margin around the outside and 'clean up' the images (depending on how you sliced them up you may have parts of adjoining characters along the edges).
I bet someone out there with some high end graphics package like PS and the skills to use it would find this a doddle but it took me hours for the first two 'fonts'.
Edited to add:
The rather ugly looking method of registering the sprites with the ['a']= LoadImage("<path>\\<file name>.png") part is important and shouldn't be changed by for example putting the path in a separate string and doing LoadImage( path .. "a.png" ) or anything similar otherwise you'll find you can't make a standalone!
Been there, done that, got all the T-Shirts!
