Just render your text by yourself (this would be most efficient).

By myself meaning what exactly? :) You mean write a text renderer, draw to a buffer and use that as a texture to display it onscreen?

I tried QPainter with and without beginNativePainting() but that messes stuff up.

By meaning ‘yourself’ is to draw textured quads of with text glyphs. You can prebake big (relatively speaking) texture with 256 glyphs, just change tex coordinates to draw particular glyph.

Rather than prebaking an image atlas, I generate it dynamically using a QPainter to draw to a texture which is displayed with quads. I don’t know how much less efficient it is to draw the characters to the image on demand rather than prebaking, but I need the flexibility to change the font to anything the system provides. You can see the code here:

http://gitorious.org/mifit/mifit/blobs/master/libs/opengl/Text.h
http://gitorious.org/mifit/mifit/blobs/master/libs/opengl/Text.cpp

Thanks for the feedback! I’ve used the texture atlas approach with each character UV mapped with lookup table in the good ‘ole software rendering times, shouldnt be too much of a hassle. Cheers, I’ll see what I’ll come up with. Cant use Quads for ogl es2 tho but nonetheless :p

matti- wrote:

Cant use Quads for ogl es2 tho but nonetheless :p

You can compose quad with two triangles. :)

Hey, I’m without my N8 for a week or so, but I’ve just finished writing openGL code for a game in the simulator, including using QGLWidget::renderText() for text rendering. But I read that it’s not supported by OpenGL ES? Does that mean it won’t show up on the phone or will cause other problems? Does anyone know if renderText() will/won’t work?

The method described above works sweetly and is portable. However filling with Qt::transparent bugged on Android, so better just render the text atlas using GIMP or similar instead of creating it from code.

Reptile wrote:

Hey, I’m without my N8 for a week or so, but I’ve just finished writing openGL code for a game in the simulator, including using QGLWidget::renderText() for text rendering. But I read that it’s not supported by OpenGL ES? Does that mean it won’t show up on the phone or will cause other problems? Does anyone know if renderText() will/won’t work?

FYI: don’t use QGLWidget::renderText(). you’ll get this message:

[Qt Message] QGLWidget::renderText is not supported under OpenGL/ES