This is the convention that most classes stick to. The likely reason
why Dialog didn't stick to the convention was to be able to provide
a default value for this argument, but that feature wasn't very useful
since every caller already had access to the default surface.
Setting descriptions and help prompts now appear fully even if they are longer
than the screen allows. Translations do not need to worry about allowed text
being wider than the screen in some fonts anymore.
Originally the font implementation was based on SFont, but it was
recently replaced by an SDL_ttf based implementation, so the name
no longer made sense.
