The current font stuff included with JOGL is minimal at best. I wrote some code that will take a Java font and draw a character onto a BufferedImage and convert that into a byte array. It supports both glBitmap and glDrawPixels, i.e. monochrome characters and full color antialiased characters. (I also have some preliminary stuff that retrieves the vector data out of a font and draws a character using that) Not only can this use all of the fonts available to java, it also supports the full unicode range of characters. The issue I have is that I can’t generate new characters from the display thread–it causes a deadlock. (due to AWT native interface locks and the locks that AWT uses when doing anything related to fonts or drawing) Two solutions I can think of is to pregenerate all the characters I need, or to generate characters in another thread and draw nothing for the missing characters until they are generated. Neither is an ideal solution and I was hoping someone might have a better idea.
You can also look into the GLUT classes in JOGL. I didn’t even realize they were there until I had written my own system which generates font using Java2D and stores them in a display list.
I’ve ported GLF to jogl as well for one of the nehe lessons (15 iirc). It’s not 100% complete, but most stuff works. Might be useful as well.
Unfortunately, the glut stuff is limited to ASCII and it’s not antialiased. The project I’m on needs to support Russian, Greek, Japanese, and simplified Chinese.