I'm drawing text in OpenGL. The text moves and changes very frequently.
I have a bitmap font atlas (png and XML files) and am able to generate the texture coordinates for glyphs. Now I'm faced with how render the quads.
It occurs to me that immediate mode would be an extremely convenient way to do it. It seems rather troublesome to manage a buffer full of ever-changing glyph quads--setting up a pool allocator, all the mapping and unmapping to update the vertices, etc.. And I wonder if the performance improvement vs immediate mode would even be that great.
As a ballpark, there would probably be no more than a few hundred glyphs on screen at once.
What do you think? Would it be terribly wrong to use immediate mode for this?