How can I make a font display with a drop shadow or with an outline around the font using Allegro 4.4.2?

I gather something like this may be possible by making a transparent font and using burn blend mode but I can not find any example programs that tell me how to do this.

That gives pretty bad results. Drawing a first with a bold version of the font and then the normal version on top works better.

So long as the drop shadows or outlines don't cross into other glyphs due to being only a pixel or two wide, Edgar's solution will work.

However, with doing more traditional drop shadows that are large and faded, or outlines intended to blend into itself, you're in trouble due to the way Allegro's font rendering system works. You would have to write your own font drawing routine to draw each glyph one at a time so that the shadows/outlines would overlap properly and you would of course have to blend them together, but the big problem is that you need to use alpha blending to pull this off, which means if your drop shadows or outlines come in more than just a single colour, they will conflict with each other. That is a problem better solved with hardware acceleration and fragment/pixel shaders.

Congratulations, you just volunteered!

What ever happend to this? https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/611384

I, too, would support the decision to include a font outline feature in allegro.