I can’t understand why we don’t have a ARB implementation for 2D fonts…
OpenGL exposes functionality of the hardware, not arbitrary conveniences for the user. Fonts are a purely software construct. They belong in user code, not in an OpenGL driver.
And I would point out that the more serious your language needs, the less likely a simple solution will work for you.
Thank you kowal but for me these are not an easy/fast way.
Using FreeType to get glyph images and putting them on the screen is reasonably easy. No, it isn’t simply giving an API call a string that magically appears on the screen, using unknown resources and performance. But it is reasonably easy. It’s simply a matter of rasterizing the glyphs, uploading them to a texture, and rendering them as needed. It shouldn’t take you more than a day or so to write such code, less if you’re not too particular about the structure of that code.
Not to mention that several of those libraries are very simple to use, no more complex than any reasonably OpenGL font rendering API might be.