Font in OpenGL

[dandymcgee]

I'm curious how others who have more experience with OpenGL are drawing strings of text to the screen. I've googled a bit and there appears to be quite a few libraries people have made to make it "easier", but after trying a few and not being able to get them working I figured I'd ask the professionals.

What (if any) libraries would you recommend, and how would I go about using them to draw 2D text to the screen. I don't need anything fancy like rotation, just plain old text.

[Falco Girgis]

I'm really not sure, but we use an image font. It's basically a spritesheet, and we manually load the width/sizes of each character.

Why the fuck would you do that, you ask?

Performance. TTF and actual font "rendering" libraries are slower than shit. They're also not going to be cross-platform. We're rendering letters at the (cheap) price of rendering little images. It isn't that big of a deal on PC, but it is on Dreamcast.

[MarauderIIC]

In more detail, it's probably something like moving character by character through the string and subtracting 'A' from it to figure out where in the font tilesheet it is, and then rendering that square. Easy when you think of it but you have to, first :)

In our system, '\n' is ignored, instead we manually set the y-coordinate that every string is drawn. But surely we could just add the height of a letter to it.

[Innerscope]

I'm not sure what OS you're running, but here's a nice app for MacOSX:
http://www.tinrocket.com/software/super ... eta/00260/

It makes it easy to generate good looking fonts for OpenGL. In addition it creates a text file containing data for each of the character's widths and heights for easier loading. Of course, you'll have to write your own function to actually load and display the font. (using Falco's method as mentioned)

[dandymcgee]

Do you happen to have a link, or could you write up a quick example program of how I would load an image and clip the letters and store them in a map or an array? All the ones I've found are either pure C (which is difficult for me to understand sometimes) or just have way too much stuff crammed into their functions. I haven't done anything with textures, I'm too used to SDL_image and SDL_ttf.

[MarauderIIC]

Can't roll you an example, but look up opengl and [tilesheets or spritesheets] and gltexcoord

[Ginto8]

Dandy, this isn't OGL, but it is the same concept: http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson30/index.php

[dandymcgee]

Dandy, this isn't OGL, but it is the same concept: http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson30/index.php

Yeah, I just didn't know how to clip in OpenGL, and still don't really know. But I'm gonna look up gltexcoord and see what I can find.