I have 3 days off in a row starting tomorrow so I'm going to code like a madman. What I want to work on during these days is font output with OpenGL. I want a platform-independent solution, so I think I'm going to go with the textured quads approach. The fonts will be defined in some texture, and then drawn to the screen on a quad using the appropriate texture coordinates for each letter. Anyone here done this before? I imagine that I have to draw the text last, after everything else in the scene, and also that I should probably switch off depth testing when I'm drawing the text. Is that the right idea?

Also, what sort of tool(s) would I use to generate the font texture? I imgaine that it would be tedious to use Photoshop or the GIMP to generate each character and then manually stitch them together into one texture. But I guess this only has to be done once for each texture set. I'm thinking of using the alpha channel so that the text blends in with whatever is in the background. That would be nifty.