Font / Character Outlines

[Stephan Rose]

Hey all,

having mostly finished my unicode string class and having taught it to
interact smoothly with wxString when necessary, I kind of realized that
at this particular moment most of my Unicode support is pretty much a
moot point in some areas of my software.

Reason being is that I have text objects on my OpenGL canvas that
currently cannot represent anything outside ASCII.

I can't use the standard bitmap/texture approaches commonly used to
render text in OpenGL as images cannot be represented by the data files
I ultimately need to generate that these texts are a part of. So for
that reason, I currently use my own vector font that renders characters
composed of line segments which can then later be correctly represented
in the output data format.

However, this does limit me to 7 bit ascii as I'm not about to go ahead
and create a vector based definition for every unicode code point. :)

Also, it doesn't give the user the ability to choose a different font if
they like.

So I either need some method of taking a font character and creating
geometrical data from it. Either in the form of line segments or
triangulated polygons. Line segments representation is more suitable but
polygons are fine too.

I've looked around a bit on google on the subject but haven't really
found anything all that terribly useful on the subject yet.

Anyone have any experience with this? Any help / suggestions appreciated
it!

Thanks,

Stephan