Text rendering in OpenGL

[Anton]

Thanks for the replies all. ZenGL seems to have good text rendering features.

I would suggest FreeType it is a portable font engine that would allow to use most fonts. I use it to create bitmap fonts but with some work I think you could pull the information you need to do full 3D. http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/

This sounds good. Are there pascal headers for FreeType2? I see it is written in C, so the only way to use it in Pascal/Delphi program would be with dynamic linking.

Mipmapping is done per texture basis, fonts shouldn't need any. Mipmapping technique is used to smoothen repeating textures like terrain that fade into distance. Font neither repeats nor has varying depth. And true, you don't want to include fonts in global single texture. You can't mipmap a texture atlas either, it will simply mess up clamping.

Yes, this makes sense. So there would be no problem to use normal linear interpolation for rendering the font texture (I think i'll want to resize the text characters sometimes).. as long there the character quad is not fading in distance?

[Carver413]

you will find the header files for freetype2 in the free pascal source (fpcsrc/2.6.4/packages/fcl-image/src/freetypeh.pp) I didn't use the freetype.pp which creates a font manager or something, I thought it to over kill for my needs. instead I followed the tutorials from the freetype sight to figure it out. there very good. I did have to make a small correction in the header file but can't remember what that was. if you run into problems I can send my modified source but better to try theres first because theres could be more up to date then mine

[vgo]

I've used Nitrogen's Font Studio and the units that come with it to render fonts. Unfortunately http://www.nitrogen.za.org/ seems to be down. Does anyone know where Nitrogen disappeared to?

EDIT: Found this one https://bitbucket.org/mikepote/font-studio Seems to have been updated in 2013.