lmemsm

Along the lines of investigating portable C GUI libraries, I started looking at cross-platform library options for font rendering in C. This area is particularly useful if you're investigating creating your own GUI library or game library. I was most interested in the TrueType font rendering libraries and techniques. It was rather surprising to read just how difficult it is to get simple internationalized text to the screen especially using graphics libraries like OpenGL.

Here's what I've located. If you have other recommendations for C font rendering libraries, please let me know.


GUI library options like nuklear and nanovg use stb_truetype.h:
https://github.com/nothings/stb
They also use some kind of font stash, such as this one used with nanovg:
https://github.com/memononen/fontstash


Other GUI libraries use FreeType2.
https://www.freetype.org/

For instance, SDL2_ttf uses FreeType2.
https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/

Allegro also has font libraries available that are based on FreeType2.
http://opensnc.sourceforge.net/alfont/mirror/

Here's one that works with Allegro or SDL:
http://kirill-kryukov.com/glyph-keeper/files.shtml


There are several font libraries for OpenGL, but there aren't many options written in C. Some are for older versions of OpenGL and some only work with later versions. Here's what I found so far:

https://github.com/rougier/freetype-gl
https://github.com/jtsiomb/libdrawtext
http://quesoglc.sourceforge.net/


Here's another C option that works with FreeType2 and embeds fonts in C programs:
https://github.com/chrisy/fontem


The most recommended technique used by OpenGL developers seems to be texture mapping. A texture can be used like a hash table to store various characters and other pixmaps that need to be rendered. An OpenGL function can draw a piece of the texture or update/change parts of it in memory without affecting performance too much. While software renderers have no real trouble copying or blending a bitmap graphic or pixmap, the newer OpenGL versions send the textures to the GPU for rendering. So utilizing a texture instead of bitmaps/pixmaps and minimizing the number of textures one is working with can improve performance.

I personally find it easier to render text with SDL. It handles copying and blending bitmaps (as an SDL_Surface) and offers a useful library (SDL_ttf) to do most of the work. SDL 2.x does use OpenGL underneath on some platforms, so some of the texture concepts used by OpenGL programmers might improve font rendering performance on some versions of SDL as well.

Freetype seems to be the library for working with TrueType fonts. SDL_ttf uses freetype to interpret the Truetype font format and create bitmaps/pixmaps to represent characters (converting them from vector format to bitmap/pixmap format). I found working with SDL_ttf a lot more user-friendly than trying to use Freetype directly.

Another viable option is stb_truetype.h. The license for this software is definitely an advantage. However, from what I've read the rendering still isn't quite as good as Freetype. I look forward to testing this out on my own at some point.

At this point, I'm still investigating SDL_ttf, stb_truetype.h and OpenGL texture mapping. A combination of these might be just what's needed in a font rendering design for a cross-platform GUI library.

Know of some other font rendering options that work well for Truetype fonts or have a better way to get fonts to the screen, I'd love to hear about it?