DCMTK

FreeType2 (www.freetype.org) is available under a BSD style license.
In many applications we want to render text on top of medical images, e.g.
in order to display patient's name, birth date etc.

Freetype is a library that provides functions to load a font and create an
anti-aliased bitmap that corresponds to a certain string. It should be
rather trivial to add some functionality to dcmimage that allows to create
images plus text. Dcmimage would have to maintain a list of text objects
(like the list of overlays already maintained today) and use FreeType and
some internal glue code to render the bitmap created by FreeType into the
image bitmap at the desired bit depth. This would be extremely useful for
example for DCMPRINT, where a print client could render text into bitmaps
that would be then sent to the printer at 12 bits/pixel.