Optimizing offscreen 2D text rendering.

Greetings,

I am using the FTGL wrapper to freetype to render text on an offscreen image. The text needs to have an outline so I render each string offset by one pixel in each direction to represent the outline, and then I render the string with the actual color in the middle. It works great, however, I need to be able to render 100 strings (with outline) in under .10 secs on a low end machine (400 MHz with equally crappy video card).

I’m thinking there must be a better way to render the outline without actually calling FTGL multiple times for each string?

Would it be feasible (computationally) to work with 2 or more offscreen contexts and use a combination of blending and translation to achieve the “text outline” effect? Are there any other clever ways to achieve this effect?

Thanks for your time.
Mike

If you asked in a forum that’s more focused on the font library of your choice and less focused on OpenGL, you’d probably get better answers faster.

I am trying something similar too using osmesa under linux. Did you manage to set the font-color using glColor? When I try, my FTGLPixmapFont only gets rendered white.