GLText
opengl truetype font renderer

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Introduction

GLText is a portable font rendering library for C++ OpenGL applications. It uses FreeType2 to read and render high-quality TrueType fonts with a minimal footprint. With just a few easy lines of C++, you can add gorgeously rendered text to your graphical applications.

GLText is an open source project licensed under the LGPL. Basically this means that you can use and link your application with it regardless of what license your application uses. If you make changes to GLText, however, you must make those changes open source under the LGPL.

Written with portablility in mind, GLText works on Windows, Linux, and IRIX - virtually anywhere that FreeType2 supports.

News

GLText 0.3.1 Released [2003.11.26]

GLText 0.3.1, a minor bugfix release, is out. The automake build includes OpenGL.h, so you can actually compile it now.

Windows users should continue using 0.3.0.

GLText 0.3.0 Released [2003.08.04]

GLText 0.3.0 has been released. Changes since 0.2.0 include:

  • New streaming interface derived from C++ iostreams. Now you can overload operator<<(ostream& out, ...) for your custom classes and output them to GLText. This also improves DLL binary compatibility in the streaming interface.
  • Renderers always draw with the current position being the upper left corner of the text.
  • Improved text appearance by using kerning information in TrueType files.
  • Added getFont() and getHeight() to FontRenderer.
  • Added getDPI() to Font.
  • When a renderer encounters a \n in the text stream, it drops down to the next line rather than trying to draw the glyph for \n.
  • Renamed CreateFont to OpenFont, which now takes an optional dpi argument.
  • Got rid of FontStyle because it was never used anyway.
  • Made method calls use the __stdcall convention on Windows so they are compatible with COM.
  • Added the TEXTURE and MIPMAP renderer types, which support alpha blending.
  • Removed setFont() from renderers, requiring that they take a font on construction.
  • Greatly reduced DLL size by removing exceptions and usages of iostreams in the library itself.

GLText 0.2.0 Released [2002.12.23]

GLText 0.2.0 has been released just in time for Christmas. Here are the major changes since the last release.

  • New FontStream interface for an STL iostream-like interface to writing text to the screen.
  • All objects are now ref-counted. Use the XXXPtr classes to have the reference counting managed for you. You won't have to worry about when to delete GLText objects any more.
  • You can now query a renderer for the width a string will be when rendered.

GLText 0.1.0 Released [2002.07.04]

GLText 0.1.0 has been released. Here are the major features:

  • Supports any TrueType font using FreeType2 as the backend.
  • Anti-aliased pixmap rendering.
  • Fast aliased bitmap rendering.
  • Doxygen API documentation.

For inquiries, wishes or comments please contact gltext-users@lists.sourceforge.net.
GLText is copyright (C) 2002 Ben Scott and released under the LGPL.