Ogre Forums

I'd have gone for something like QT - seems that all the big boys are using it (eg. Source Film Maker) so it should be good, but UI in CEGUI is definitely an option provided it's got all the necessary support - Unicode textboxes, System browse-for-file dialogs? etc.

Abstracting away the Windows API calls is also probably the way I'd do it, but there are also complete custom font rendering solutions like FreeType: http://www.freetype.org/ - In fact FreeType sounds pretty damn cool as a uniform platform to get font metrics, draw characters and such.

Well, FreeType seems like the way to go indeed.

The reason CEGUI is appealing is because you get to see the font exactly as it would be shown by CEGUI, because you're rendering it in CEGUI from the very beginning. The downside is the lack of themes, it would be quite a task to make a theme that's at least decent looking.

Qt comes with good themes out of the box...

Perhaps a mix of the two would be in order. Font preview in CEGUI, the rest of the UI in Qt...

As for plugin framework, only solution I think of is to make plugins scriptable, that means embedding python or lua so you have plugin scripts for exporting, and give up non-portable binary plugin support. GIMP and Blender do it, perhaps so should FontStudio.

Sounds good! LUA or Python would work very well I think... I'm guessing the Python LUA virtual machine that you would run would be able to write to disk and have access to the local file system...