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I converted the old GLTX article to drupal’s textile format. You will find a short report of the 3D font rendering technology in the Articles section.

Expect some screenshots of GLTX in action in the next few days.

Introduction

Visualization toolkits today and 3D user interfaces in the future require solutions for displaying 2D text decals in 3D space.

Current 3D text rendering libraries suffer from the following restrictions:

• The inability to use arbitrary true-type fonts.
• The low rendering quality of the 3D characters.

• Slow rendering in case of polygonised glyphs.

With the combination of well chosen mechanisms to display text in 3D, it is possible to achieve a high (though unhinted) text quality while rendering many thousands of glyphs per second on stock 3D hardware.

This text will show how and describes an implementation of a platform independent OpenGL library for 3D text.