I had to write my own font rendering code for lack of much in the way of general purpose libraries for doing it in 3-D engines back around 2005. Your options were, more or less, to pay through the nose for Scaleform, to roll your own, or to use something really ugly. So I had to learn some basic typography to tie Freetype into a text rendering engine, which got me practical experience with editing font files, anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, processing digraphs, Unicode, the works.
Web 2.0 started more or less right after that, so interest in digital typography in general exploded. I ended up working on some applications of text layout in non-left-to-right and pictograph languages for 2D canvas, SVG, and web based image manipulation in general. So out of sheer coincidence my hobby work messing with OpenGL/Freetype was suddenly directly relevant.
I had to write my own font rendering code for lack of much in the way of general purpose libraries for doing it in 3-D engines back around 2005. Your options were, more or less, to pay through the nose for Scaleform, to roll your own, or to use something really ugly. So I had to learn some basic typography to tie Freetype into a text rendering engine, which got me practical experience with editing font files, anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, processing digraphs, Unicode, the works.
Web 2.0 started more or less right after that, so interest in digital typography in general exploded. I ended up working on some applications of text layout in non-left-to-right and pictograph languages for 2D canvas, SVG, and web based image manipulation in general. So out of sheer coincidence my hobby work messing with OpenGL/Freetype was suddenly directly relevant.