if your main goal is just to write 2D text to your 3D scene than you can use the code below
My experience with the GL text output methods you referred to is that you don't get anti-aliasing and so the text doesn't look very good.
MFC ... I've been there and since I meet Qt never use it again
That's great, and perhaps thats eventually the way to go. But from a standpoint of cost, I was hoping I could have Qt perform OpenGL rendering using my existing GL rendering context. I mentioned MFC for completeness, but really, the question is that I have a GL rendering context setup and ready to render, so how do I get Qt to just use that and do its GL rendering.

I've seen examples of Qt doing 2D rendering in OpenGL and it looks FAR nicer than what I've achieved using the font techniques you included in your reply. So I'm wondering how I can leverage that Qt OpenGL rendering in my existing app.