A while ago I wrote for my own uses a font loading/rendering helper library. I posted it on sourceforge because a few people in other forums expressed interest. There's been alot of talk lately on font rendering in games, so I thought I'd post a link in case anyone is interested.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ttftriangulator/

Unlike most font rendering libraries, this doesn't use or produce a texture/sprite sheet. Rather it triangulates the characters into an actual mesh. There are a couple different choices of triangulators, one that produces very compact representations that uses the technique described here: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch25.html. There are a few others as well.

Its worked well for myself and from what I understand a few others. If any bugs are found I'm happy to fix them.

Ya, after reading the chapter in GPU Gems 3 I was inspired and couldn't think of a better place to use that than with font rendering. Then I realized it could actually be useful and decided to clean it up a bit and post it. But really it was just about having fun :)

This library really needs some kind of docs or at least example code, I wasn't able to figure it out.

Ya I guess it does, when I have some time I will. Really quickly the steps to use it would be...

1) Create a Font object like:

TTF::Font font("fonts/Nexa-Light.otf");

The Font object has all the font data, like bounding rects, kerning info, headers, code point to glyph index conversion, ect...

2) Create a triangulator:

TTF::TriangulatorI triangulator;

TTF::MeshSmall mesh;

font.GetGlyph(CodePoint(text[i]),triangulator,mesh);

TTF::vec2s t = font.GetKerning(CodePoint(text[i]),CodePoint(text[i+1]));