Rendering Vector Text OpenGL

Question

I've read Rendering Vector Art on the GPU on rendering shapes that are defined by quadratic/cubic Bezier curve boundaries. I was hoping to build off of this to create text that fills in as if it were stroked by a pen or brush somehow. (Any advice on how to do this is welcome.)

However, I'm a little unsure of where to get my hands on fonts / shapes that have the format specified in this paper (arrays of points representing quadratic/cubic Beziers).

Does anyone know of a way of getting font/vector drawings that are in this format? The authors of the paper mention truetype fonts, but according to

TrueType Font Parsing in C

it looks like parsing truetype fonts might involve a lot more than this? I know there are also formats like .svg, but I am not sure where to start with that, since it holds so much more than what I am looking to get out of it.

As an example, is there some type of file format that I could convert a .svg file or truetype file to, perhaps by using something inkscape's export function, such that the resulting format would be possible to parse for an array of points and control points?

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I accepted an answer below, but for anyone interested in this, you should check out

https://github.com/quarnster/TTF

It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. The code works great, but it's a bit hard to understand how to use it. It makes more sense if you read about the TTF format, like here An Introduction to TrueType Fonts: A look inside the TTF format.

Answer 1

I suggest using the cross platform library FreeType (http://www.freetype.org/). FreeType loads font files and, among other things, provides the bounding curves of glyphs in the typeface. Specifically, you should look into the function FT_Outline_Decompose, which gives exactly what you want.