The main reason I am interested in JOGL and the Java2D/JOGL interoperability is because our game relies heavily on text and we need the text to be clear and crisp. LWJGL is an alternative but doesn't offer much (anything?) in the way of good text rendering.
LWJGL differs from JOGL in that it is, for the most part, only an OpenGL binding. It doesn't include a bunch of other stuff. I see this as a good thing.
I wrote Unicode font support for Slick, which is based on LWJGL:
https://bob.newdawnsoftware.com/repos/slick/trunk/Slick/src/org/newdawn/slick/UnicodeFont.javaIt wouldn't be too hard to pull this out of Slick. There is also a tool for designing your fonts:
http://slick.cokeandcode.com/demos/hiero.jnlp(Blame Kevin, Slick's author, for the Hiero tool not closing properly.
) This tool saves a ".hiero" file that UnicodeFont can open which describes font size, spacing, and effects (colors, borders, etc). UnicodeFont then renders (at startup or on the fly) glyphs from TrueType fonts to OpenGL atlas textures using Java2D. Because UnicodeFont can render glyphs on the fly, apps can support allowing the user to type Unicode characters.
The Hiero tool can also alternatively output the BMFont format and any number of packed glyph images. This is a fine solution if you know all the glyphs up front. Quality is the same, including kerning. The AngelCodeFont class in Slick renders fonts with these. The BMFont format is easy to render, eg I have written a renderer for both the iPhone and Android.
