The drawtext command in the Max2d module of Blitzmax uses regular fonts loaded via some code you can find in the following sources. font.bmx, imagefont.bmx, image.bmx. But its might be difficult to figure out what does what since a lot of the code from Blitzmax is spread over several sources and a lot of times types, methods and functions are overwritten in other types which are extended. So it can be quite confusing.
This is why I decided to go with bitmap fonts created from truetype via a tool I made. This tool will then place the characters of the font onto a power2 image and save out either a text or binary list of where each character is on the image and what size is has. I then load this image with my sprite engine and use this one texture and UV coords to create quads with individual characters on them. This works just fine for what I have used it for so far. But since I already did the font-2-bitmap tool a long time ago, it was ofcause not that difficult to get the rest of the work done.
But I am thinking you would like to get the font loaded directly into your program and I unfortunately do not know enough about how truetype font files are put together to know how to handle them other than drawing them onto a buffer and grabbing what is needed.
I have used varied width bitmap fonts lots of times even with BlitzPlus when I was using that for making demos. Its fairly easy to setup, but it needs that little extra work of packing a font onto an image and making the coord sets for each character. The advantage is that you only use one texture for the entire font instead one for each character.
[edit] I just did a search and found this:
http://gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Font_System It has a C font class which uses the bitmap creator from AngelCode, and if you check the angelCode page, you will see that it packs the characters onto a bitmap and then writes a list for for characters in either txt,xml or binary. I think that most people who do demo stuff uses a bitmap and some sort of bitmap font code.
