Draw extruded 3d text with pyopengl?

Question

What is the best way to draw 3d text with pyopengl, preferably with modern opengl ?

There seem to be quite a few examples, but mostly in old-style opengl and not for python

Answer 1

1. First you need a text outline which requires a font. On windows you can use WinGDI fonts by creating a dummy context, selecting a created font on it and getting outlines of every character. For Truetype you load glyphs into the face and simply access their outlines.
2. For the front & back face of your 3D text, you need to convert the outlines/contours to triangles. Either use the good old GLU tesselator, the relative new tesselation shader of OpenGL 4 or a geometry library like CGAL. Then simply draw the triangles for the front and again with some additional depth for the back.
3. For the sides you simply span rectangles behind outline segments/lines with height equal to your wished text depth - these are your text sides. You can simply use a depth vector and transform everything afterwards or calculate the orthogonal vector with 2 segments.

You notice that this all can be expensive, so don't hesitate to cache as much as possible.

I referenced to C sources because i'm more familiar with these, but i bet there're python equivalents to port my explanations.