Fast text rendering in OpenGL

Question

I would like suggestions as to how to render text quickly in OpenGL.

Currently, I am reading a true type font and dynamically generating a texture containing all the ASCII characters, for each font used, for each font size used. Each texture is generated just once and kept for later use.

During the draw phase, I draw everything line by line.

I have a static array on memory, compute the kerning ect, modify the vertex positions and texture coordinates for the line. Then I bind the corresponding texture and render the line.

Unfortunately this seems to be very slow. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

The best way IMO is to use distance fields. Will use less space, be fast, supports several nice text effects easily, and is pretty easy to implement ( especially since you've already seem to have the font -> texture parts ready ).