Original Post
Greetings, I currently have a simple font rendering scheme. Each "font" in my system is composed of a *.bmp file that contains 4 ASCII character sets to cover normal, bold, italic, and bold/italic. Along with the *.bmp file is a definition file that describes the overall size of the *.bmp image, the maximum width and height of each glyph (each glyph is assigned a 'box' within which the actual glyph is drawn, from which it can then be properly extracted), a global font height, and then a table indicating the width of each individual glyph. This works quite nicely right now. I can change various font types, change the font style (bold and/or italic), etc. However, the major drawbacks are: can't change the font size without a whole new font set (*.bmp and definition file), limited to ASCII characters, and creating a new font set is tedious at best. So I would like to find a way to pull in TrueType fonts. The idea would be to read the contents and generate a font set for the particular settings (font size, style [bold, italic, etc]). The end result would be a texture loaded into memory and some sort of structure that defines the characteristics/sizing of each glyph in the set. I see there are several libraries that exist to do stuff like this already, but I'm not sure which direction to go. Some of the libraries seem to do way more than I need and I end up getting a bit confused. Any suggestions?