I just got Font handling up and running! It ended up being a bit of a habit hole, as proper font support required getting alpha blending up and running too, and once i had gone there, I dumped the bmp crate for the image crate, with a much larger capability and easy handling of alpha layers.

I'm using the rusttype library from the redox-os project. It wasn't too hard to to get it working ok, and I can use google fonts to get choose some nice typefaces. 

Now that I have the main canvas primitives that I want, I can get to adding some basic gui elements and then move on to a sort of gui - view setup, and get a little mvc style thing going.