4 replies to this topic

[Acharis]

I have been look at this and it seems the NeHe tutorial for FreeType fonts (http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/freetype_fonts_in_opengl/24001/ ) is the most reasonable solution... There are some frameworks but these seems to be not documented and/or have rumours to be slow. Or maybe there are other solutions you could recommend?

 

I'm asking for a practical solution, what you personally found the best and most hasslefree.

 

[samoth]

Textured quads with signed distance field textures are the one solution that works well, and with good quality.

Read this: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf

Edited by samoth, 23 December 2012 - 11:42 AM.

[Necrolis]

Give freetype-gl a look-through, its simple and has support for quite a few font features (as well as signed distance fields). It also has so code reuse features, so you can use the same code to render primitives and 2D-textured quads.

[mattdesl]

If you do not need perfectly scalable fonts, then plain old bitmap fonts are very simple and hassle-free. 

 

You can see my minimal implementation here.

[slicer4ever]

windows has wglUseFontOutline

 

however i'm in the camp of just using textured quads to render font(generated via LibFreeType), you could also use the geometry shader/vertex points to pass even less data to the gpu for on-demand font drawing.