I added support for solid colorkey truetype font rendering and alpha
blended truetype font dithering to the SDL_ttf package. It’s still
under development (and will probably be used by the Loki Alpha Centauri
port), but you can get a sneak preview at:
http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/projects/SDL_ttf/src/SDL_ttf-1.1.0.tar.gz
This will also be featured in the next Pirates Ho! article. 
See ya!
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software