If you want cartoon-like, shadowed, gradient-filled+border, etc, GlyphTool, FTGL and GLF are not going to help you either...

Though yes, under those circumstances, their approach is more appropriate. You'd better hope you never want to ship in Arabic though

OneSadCookie Wrote:If you want cartoon-like, shadowed, gradient-filled+border, etc, GlyphTool, FTGL and GLF are not going to help you either...

On the contrary, the whole reason I wrote this tool is to get text like that in game,
What I did to get fonts like that was generate my texture with all the ASCII characters using GlyphTool then edit it in photoshop to give it a drop shadow, texture fill and bevel and emboss, then using an alpha channel and correct blending modes got some snazzy text effects in OpenGL.

Is text rendering speed really an issue in any program?

I wrote a simple bitmap font drawing class in Ruby. Even that could draw a screen full of 9pt text and barely break a sweat.

Skorche Wrote:Is text rendering speed really an issue in any program?

Water Tower 3D took a significant performance hit on lower-end CPUs when I was redrawing onscreen text every frame (using FreeType). In this case, it was only five or six text fields with ten characters or so in each one. It's fine now that I only redraw text when it changes, but it was definitely an issue when I didn't.