title: What is state-of-the-art for text rendering in OpenGL as of version 4.1?
body: <p>There are already a number of questions about text rendering in OpenGL, such as:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2071621/opengl-live-text-rendering">How to do OpenGL live text-rendering for a GUI?</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>But mostly what is discussed is rendering textured quads using the fixed-function pipeline.  Surely shaders must make a better way.</p>
  
  <p>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).</p>
  
  <p>What is the recommended approach for text-rendering using modern OpenGL?  (Citing existing software using the approach is good evidence that it works well)</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Geometry shaders that accept e.g. position and orientation and a character sequence and emit textured quads</li>
  <li>Geometry shaders that render vector fonts</li>
  <li>As above, but using tessellation shaders instead</li>
  <li>A compute shader to do font rasterization</li>
  </ul>