techniques for displaying text

[MichaelJPCT]

right now i am looking into text rendering. after some research i found several ways to put text onto screen:
1) texture blitting as the way jpct examples do
2) billboard object3D placed in front of camera
3) using overlay class of jpct
4) make rectangles to hold texture of each character and render these rectangles with ortho projection and depth-test off

i would like to know whether blitting is the fastest method (runtime performance) and whether the 4th method can be done in jpct - i need to manipulate opengl states manually such as calling glDisable, glMatrixMode at a specific time in the rendering process.

[EgonOlsen]

You can't fiddle around with direct GL calls. Blitting should actually be OK, have a look at raft's classes for text rendering. They are very helpful.

[MichaelJPCT]

can i achieve multipass rendering of the same world (with different camera settings) or sequential rendering of multiple worlds in a specified order?

[EgonOlsen]

Yes and yes, just do it. But you can't render the same Object3D instance in different world instances unless you constantly remove and add it.

[EgonOlsen]

BTW: raft's classes for text rendering: http://www.jpct.net/forum2/index.php/topic,1074.0.html

[MichaelJPCT]

many thanks, i'll look into it.