I really have no idea whether it is faster, 1500 ms doesn't seem like it is worth worring about. I create one very long bitmap and use it that way but I dont use opengl to render my gui but rather send the final product to opengl. this way it only needs to be redrawn if something changes and because there are so many effects that can be applyed that I could not do in opengl at this time. some day perhaps. anyway the documentation on the freetype2 website is really good and is what I used. I found the fpc solution rather overkill myself. one of the commands was missing from the pascal header so I had to add that in myself.