Warning: Using a smooth bitmapped font memory problems

Beginners
1

I think the explanation of display method on the wiki is good (polygons for large fonts and bitmapped for small fonts).

However, I do have some questions:

I don’t see why texture is not ideal all of the time as it

The other thing I don’t understand is why I sometimes get the warning:

Warning: Using a smooth bitmapped font with size great than 128 can cause memory problems

Is the idea that I should use polygon / texture display method at this point? And what is considered a “large” font size (i.e. when fonts should be used with Polygons instead of bitmapped)?

Lastly what display method is recommended for fonts that change size (or change their display resolution)?

2

Each Glyph in a bitmap font needs to be placed into a texture, This is approx point size pixels wide/height. By default the first 128 characters are placed into the glyph map. So that’s approx 8192x256 pixel map for a 128 point size font. As you get bigger or have more glyphs, this gets larger.

A texture font always creates glyphs at 128 point size and then downscales the glyphs for smaller display sizes

if the font size is changing dynamically then a texture or polygon font is preferred as that doens’t require rebuilding the glyph map in a bitmap texture.