There are already a number of questions about text rendering in OpenGL, such as:
- How to do OpenGL live text-rendering for a GUI?
But mostly what is discussed is rendering textured quads using the fixed-function pipeline. Surely shaders must make a better way.
I’m not really concerned about internationalization, most of my strings will be plot tick labels (date and time or purely numeric). But the plots will be re-rendered at the screen refresh rate and there could be quite a bit of text (not more than a few thousand glyphs on-screen, but enough that hardware accelerated layout would be nice).
What is the recommended approach for text-rendering using modern OpenGL? (Citing existing software using the approach is good evidence that it works well)
- Geometry shaders that accept e.g. position and orientation and a character sequence and emit textured quads
- Geometry shaders that render vector fonts
- As above, but using tessellation shaders instead
- A compute shader to do font rasterization
