   Font Drawing in OpenGL
  I would like to know what approach I should take in order to create a flexible (and hopefully reasonably fast) font library.  The problem, in this case, is SIZE (and i guess italic vs bold).  I want to be able to represent a wide range of sizes for a given font.  But I really don't want to sacrafice batching. So i've come up with a few approaches.1. Mip-Maps(Different sizes are represented with different Mip-levels)+ You have an opportunity to batch more-Hard to Implement IMHO?What happens when the size range "grows"?  The largest size should in theory become mip level 0 (openGL wont accept it if its not like that?)2. Different Textures(Each size has it's own texture)+ Easier to implement IMHO+ User control over releasing of unreferenced sizes- more state changes? When should size textures be loaded?? When should size textures be Unloaded? what conditions should be met for unloading? (timeout + 0 references?)The more I think about it the more i think the mip map approach is impossible, instead it seems more feasible to simply load the largest size texture, and generate mipmaps from that with the s3tc extension (i guess)any questions? comments? suggestions? answers to my questions about each implementation?thanks a lot-Dan   
  I'd suggest simply rendering fonts to bitmaps as they're requested and then rendering them. In other words, you get a request to render some string, you query FreeType or something to render it into a texture, then you draw the texture on screen.   ;  So dont provide for any sort of precaching of these textures? (looking back at it my post isnt terribly written but i didnt state what i hoped to accomplish through the methods i suggested) Which is to maintain a reasonable frame rate by caching the textures.  (Maybe this is a silly concern)thanks-Dan   ;  What would stop you from rendering to textures and keeping them around for later?  He never said you couldn't do that.;  Well thats why i asked haha.  Anyways, thats what i want to do, but its a question of HOW, i suppose #2 s the best solution, but it still leaves the questions of releasing textures (and heck, loading them).  And those are really my questioncheers, thanks,-Dan   ;  Sorry to bump, but i'm interested to see what cases would be best for loadng and unloading of texturescheers-Dan   ;  one thing with fonts is normally u use them in the HUD/displaying tinfo onscreen etc. now in this case u dont want to have them mipmapped at all   ;  Right, I just thought of that as a possible way to increase batchingcheers-Dan   