It may not be pure OpenGL, but my OpenGL book says that glXUseXFont will load an X font, which builds a bunch of display lists, each one of which containing a character rendered with that font.
I'm curious though. Why OpenGL? SDL plus SDL_ttf could have handled things just as well, plus Y would have pointed down, not up.
Simple DirectMedia Layer. Cross-platform multimedia library that has audio, input and 2D graphics. SDL_ttf is a standard extension to it that provides TrueType font support. If Arc can load C libraries, it can should be able to load SDL.