I need to draw a VBO consisting of font data, mainly numbers. How do I obtain the data and send it to the VBO?

I know that there is a library called freetype which should do this, but that uses bitmap fonts and I do not need bitmaps in my project. I just want polygon data which I can fill with my own color and reposition/scale.

Freetype also does outline fonts, but how do I go about tessellating the outline fonts to create accurate geometry?

Is what I am trying to achieve difficult? Can I find some examples of something similar?