There's also the pygame.freetype module which is more modern, works with more fonts and offers additional functionality.
Create a font object with pygame.freetype.SysFont() or pygame.freetype.Font if the font is inside of your game directory.
You can render the text either with the render method similarly to the old pygame.font.Font.render or directly onto the target surface with render_to.
import pygame
import pygame.freetype # Import the freetype module.
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800, 600))
GAME_FONT = pygame.freetype.Font("your_font.ttf", 24)
running = True
while running:
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
running = False
screen.fill((255,255,255))
# You can use `render` and then blit the text surface ...
text_surface, rect = GAME_FONT.render("Hello World!", (0, 0, 0))
screen.blit(text_surface, (40, 250))
# or just `render_to` the target surface.
GAME_FONT.render_to(screen, (40, 350), "Hello World!", (0, 0, 0))
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.quit()