opengl es texture atlas for text

Question

I need help on understanding the workflow for rendering text in opengl es using a texture atlas. This is for an iphone game.

I've read this already:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/512258/is-there-a-decent-opengl-text-drawing-library-for-the-iphone-sdk

What tools do I use to generate the texture atlas image? Do I need freetype for this part? What file format should the image be?

In my iphone code...besides the texture atlas image, what else do I need to correctly render the text? Does freetype need to be included in my iphone source code? Am I generating an XML file with the glyph data as it relates to my texture atlas so that I don't have to load freetype into my iphone source code?