I was wondering if A5 had a way to draw only N chars of a string rather than keep going until it hits NULL?

Thanks

al_ref_buffer + al_draw_ustr perhaps.

You could just warp the allegro write routine in to something like this:

//The function assumes valid input.
void myWrite(char* str,int n){
    char ch=str[n+1];

    str[n+1]='\0';
    /*Allegro write routine here*/
    str[n+1]=ch;
}

I thought of that, but I was hoping to avoid doing memory ops, and also for Unicode, I was hoping to avoid doing a BringToNextUTF8() function,

I'm working on adding multi color to my text box and unfortunately,this means I must draw character by character: like this:

Which ends up using about 7% more cpu than drawing text line by line

There's no point, since internally allegro does what I said in my post.

void al_draw_text(const ALLEGRO_FONT *font,
   ALLEGRO_COLOR color, float x, float y, int flags,
   char const *text) 
{
   ALLEGRO_USTR_INFO info;
   ASSERT(text);
   al_draw_ustr(font, color, x, y, flags, al_ref_cstr(&info, text));
}

You'll make that str array using n and then allegro will use strlen to figure out what n must have been. You can just avoid all that by using al_ref_buffer and al_draw_ustr directly.

The complication is, I cannot use al functions because Allegro is wrapped into a backend of my GUI API. But under normal circumstances I would do as you said.

In most cases you will have long spans of the same colour, so you don't need to draw character by character.

I don't get it.

The point of creating a backend independent system is so the paint events of the widgets do not need rewriting when one switches from ex, al5 to sdl, to gl etc. In the same way using HeapAlloc() in an Allegro program would be silly and break cross platform.

also, what does one do in the event that every character has a different color (worst case)

strncpy?

So use those al_ functions in your backend. Like you're doing with all the rest of the al_ functions.

So you want to know if A5 has a way of doing something, but you don't want to use A5 functions?

You care?

However, in my writing routines I used a putpixel

Append:
Unless too much output it isn't an issue, and it adds great flexibility.
Although probably it was just cos' I'm not that familiar with the library itself, and because I love the basics overall..