> Are fonts always rendered 'completely' these days? I thought that the fonts would be rendered once to a cache of bitmaps/textures, and then those bitmaps can

> Are fonts always rendered 'completely' these days? I thought that the fonts would be rendered once to a cache of bitmaps/textures, and then those bitmaps can be copied to the screen/buffer pretty much instantaneously. They are. But (a) non-Latin languages often miss in the cache; (b) subpixel positioning makes cache misses happen more often; (c) sometimes people animate font size, negating the optimization; (d) we care about initial load time.