Ilmari Heikkinen <kig / misfiring.net> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Is there some simple and nice Ruby lib for rendering text into an OpenGL
> texture? Something that takes a string and puts out a BGRA/ARGB pixels.
>
> Or if that's a bad idea, what's the usual way of rendering nice-looking
> text in GL? By nice-looking I mean variable width anti-aliased truetype
> fonts with different font sizes, hinting, line heights and all the usual
> font rendering lib niceties. Those niceties being the main reason I
> don't really want to cook up my own font renderer :)

If you're using GLUT, it's got simple text-rendering built-in.

If you just want to render the glyphs into a 2D array, libfreetype is
built for that.  There are ruby bindings for it but I don't know what
they're like.

Otherwise, FTGL is nice, but I don't see any ruby bindings for it.  It
has lazy-loaded, texture-based fonts for fast rendering, and extruded
geometry fonts for when you want render text as a solid object from
different angles.  Hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to wrap some ruby
bindings around it.

HTH.