I'd like to recommend a very small but effective font rasterizer library
Scalable Screen Font
Advantages:
- Free and Open Source (MIT licensed)
- Dependency-free, stb-style single header file, no library needed
- Simple C/C++ API, very easy to integrate into any game
- Small size (the full source is only 64K, including comments)
- Has a very storage efficient font file format (only 20% - 30% of the size of a TTF)
- Converter and GUI editor binaries provided for Linux, Windows and MacOS
- Full UNICODE and UTF-8 support (including up-to-down CJK ideograms)
- Monospace bitmap fonts
- Proportional bitmap fonts
- Vector (outline-based) fonts
- and even colorful pixel fonts
NOTE: the Font Editor application which comes with the library can import virtually all fonts out there (PNG image fonts, TrueType, OpenType, PostScript, SplineFont, web fonts, BDF, PCF, etc. you name it). For example I haven't designed the FreeSerif font above with the editor from ground up, instead I've just opened freeserif.ttf and simply saved it as freeserif.sfn with a single click.
I'd really like to hear your opinion about it!
Cheers,
bzt