To name a few sites that I have looked at. But what I was really wondering is - What do the people who visit this site use on a regular basis and why did you make that decision (easy to use, fast, cross platform, anti-aliasing, etc…)
Use a 256x256 texture with all of the characters on it. Then you draw the letters with textured quads, using texture coordinate tricks to display the appropriate letters. When you load this texture, make the area around the letters transparent.
There is a tool somewhere on the nehe page that will generate a font texture like the one I mentioned, using the fonts on your computer.
I use the same method - i use the ascii value of the character to get the x and y coordinates of the letter on my font texture and display it that way - it’s really easy to do
e.g. A = 65 (pretty sure but it’s early) = 6 character widths down and five across…
the principe is the same, but the generator is a bit more flexible than glFont. You can have larger textures( better looking fonts ) and use non monospaced fonts