Hm, if we're doing GPU rendering for speed, I'd suggest uploading vector glyph data to the GPU and rasterising on the GPU in the pixel shader, rather than using FreeType. See here: http://wdobbie.com/post/gpu-text-rendering-with-vector-textu... . The WebGL Demo is really impressive - it lets you zoom in and out on a multi-page PDF at speeds I haven't seen anywhere else.
This is not fast. It uses less texture memory but it is not faster than 2 triangles per character. This is why no one really uses this technique in a production system right now.
