Im using outline fonts in my program and ive got everything working just great, there is only one problem, i did a time test and found that the call to wglusefontoutlines takes about 1.8 seconds to complete. this is way too slow for my boss and the customers that this product goes to since as it is now, the whole thing gets reloaded when new data comes in. is there any way to speed up the call to wglUseFontOutlines ? i will be looking for a way to minimize the calls to it but even if i get it down to just one call per run the 2 seconds is still a vast amount of time when you think about it. so if anyone knows how to speed it up, or alternatives to using outline fonts in opengl to create 3d fonts to put on the screen, then id be greatly appreciative.

The call shouldn''t take anywhere near that long (of course, your machine speed could be a factor here...). Try setting the ''Deviation'' parameter in the wglUseFontOutlines call to something other than 0.0; say, 0.4 or so. This will drastically reduce the complexity of the objects.

Well that cut it from 1.8 seconds to about 1.0, i increased the deviation to 0.6 and it cut it down even more.
Thanks for the help, this gives me a little more to work from and will hopefully be a great improvement when i run this in release mode.
im on a 933 mhz machine with 256 megs of ram and a gf2 vid chipset. so im not too low in the specs.

Yeah, it''s a trade-off between the ''sloppiness'' of the font outline and the amount of time you want to spend rendering them, etc. I usually use 0.4, +/- 0.2. The intricacy of the font used is a factor, too - stay away from script fonts.

im not really worried about the sloppiness, the font is just for the display of a scale on the diagram, nothing too important, as long as they are readable, the complexity/smoothness is only important for the part view itself so im not really sacrificing anything by lowering it.
im using arial. is this one of the best fonts?
thanks for the help btw!

Arial is what I usually use. MS Sans Serif is another good selection. It''s good to stick with something you can be reasonable sure will be installed on all target machines, and those two are always there. (At least they''d better be! Your app will probably be the least of the problems, if they aren''t.)

: )