Assuming this for quality rendering of text on an OpenGL capable device:
You can start by diving into
Chris Greens' Valve Paper[
^]
You would typically use something like
freetype[
^] to retrive the outlines of the glyphs used to render the text.
Trivial rendering can be achieved by doing something like this:
Drawing Text in a Double-Buffered OpenGL Window[
^]
Best regards
Espen Harlinn