Working on a new rendering system to render characters from TTF files to a GL texture for fast drawing brings up the following:

In terms of performance which is faster or has the lower memory usage, if there is a difference: 256 very small textures each with one character in an array (easy access via ASCII code ) or a very big texture with 255 characters in it and a function to calculate co-ordinates?

Just a thought... Although I might implement both if there is wither has better CPU/memory footprints. I simply can't seem to find much info on this one.

Bonus question: If I load a font in size 12, is that 12 pixels high? Or is there some other conversion. I think it differs by DPI but if it is not rendered and is on a gl texture in memory is that also affected?

cheers,
code_glitch