You have a couple of choices:

First, you could just let GDI do the work. it''s not _THAT_ slow, and you get alot of fonts to choose from ;-) plus you get font coloring and other effects (bold, italic, etc.) for "free".

Another method is to make your own bitmapped font. Just like any other set of sprites, draw your text in your favorite paint program and save them off. You can "mark" baselines and character widths with signature pixels just outside of the normally drawn area of the font. Generally, you''ll want to load the bitmap and then split each letter into it''s own surface (that avoids the problem of having a DX surface wider than the display, which causes some video cards fits). The advantage of this method is that you can get some pretty fancy text effects with your paint program. The disadvantage is that it''s a pain to change the font and recompute text metrics, etc.

A third method is to use the GDI to render each needed character of your font at runtime, using the text metric
information from the GDI font into a one DX surface per letter. The advantage here is that you get all of the speed of blitting letters, and all of the flexibility of using the GDI font renderer.

Good luck.
-- Pryankster