Selective transparency

I’m using gl4java, but i was wondering if any of you had any advice…

I’m drawing a number of spheres that and i want to put 3d text inside them, i want the spheres to be transparent allowing the user to see the text inside.

With my current approach everything ends up being transparent…any ideas, would this be easily solved with two seperate display lists?

Many thanks.

If it helps the spheres are textured, rather than calling blend shall i specify an alpha channel for this?

draw the text first
enable blending
eg src_alpha one_minus_src_alpha
disable lighitng
use colour glColor4f(1,1,1,0.5)
draw the sphere

tweak the above