OpenGL dynamic font glyph cache library

Question

I have begun work on an OpenGL application (all on my own and with little knowledge) and started with FTGL, rendering true type fonts, which, with alot of text has a great impact on frames per second.

I believe that to overcome this limitation one needs to generate a font atlas and save glyphs to opengl textures which are then drawn by shaders.

I have done a search of github for such a library and found several, a few of which are incomplete (and by their own admission have memory leaks)

I am looking for, and hoping that one of you can recommend, the most stable opengl font library that you preffer and does the aforementioned. I also need unicode support.

Or a guide to help a noob like me achieve this

Thankyou for reading

Answer 1

Personally, I've used the BinPacking by Jukka Jylänki (see http://clb.demon.fi/files/RectangleBinPack.pdf and http://clb.demon.fi/files/RectangleBinPack/) to build a glyph atlas. Combined with the freetype library (http://freetype.org/) for loading glyphs from ttf fonts and a routine to turn utf8 strings into unicode codepoints (RFC3629 is very informative, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629), this makes up my font system.

If you don't want to write your own, I would recommend freetype-gl (https://github.com/rougier/freetype-gl) for being bug free and relatively easy to use. It also has most features you'd want in a text renderer, like outlines, shadows and other effects.