masking

hello, newbie here
just want to ask if it is possible to use a tga w/ alpha during texturing and still retain the alpha values or should i just use a bitmap and its black and white mask where only the black part is rendered.

If you mean the framebuffer will retain alpha values, then yes, but only if the pixel format has a destination alpha channel.

thanks for the reply
anyway, ive tried texturing w/ a tga+alpha but the transparent parts appear white instead of being transparent. im using it for fonts, i hope you get what im trying to do

Yes it is possible, if your RGBA texture is properly initialized, you can have 8bit alpha.

glEnable(GL_BLENDING);
glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);

No need for destination alpha for this.

okay thanks a lot! got it!