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.
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.
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
.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.
