I just downloaded and installed FTGL and Freetype2 to render text in openGL. I was able to compile and run the demo programs included in the FTGL "demo" folder, but I'm having a hard time using FTGL in my Xcode project. I've added "/usr/local/include/" to the User Header Search Path of my project. When I build the project it fails at the Linking stage, yielding an error regarding the ctor of FTOulineFont. My best guess is that it can't find an implementation of the FTOutlineFont in the "include" directories and that I need to add the proper libraries to my project for it to compile. This is where I'm stuck. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

why is FTGL in /usr/local?

just add the dir containing the FTGL headers to your target's header search paths, and drag libftgl.a into your project.

(then realize that FTGL is slow, and has one of the most bizarre APIs known to man).

A few years ago when I did some stuff with FTGL, I made an XCode project to compile it into a framework. I still have a download up for it here. Since the latest stable release is in 2004, it should still be up to date. I don't remember if I made any changes to the source code to get it to compile, but if I didn't then you should be able to drop in any newer source and re-use the projects. (though you might have to add or remove files from the project)