If you want to place a line of text on the screen, you need to create a label. There are two types of labels in Cocos2d: CCLabelBMFont and CCLabelTTF. Bitmap Font labels are the fancy labels created with Glyph Designer, mentioned earlier in this book. TrueType Font labels are regular, unformatted text labels that use either a font file that's already on the phone or a file you've added to your project.
Tip
Note that if you have a label that often needs updating, for example, a score counter or a health value, it's more efficient to use BMFonts in those cases, even if the font is a plain white font and looks exactly the same in TTF format.