I wouldn't scale each character up on each access though (we won't hardware accelerate the scaling, and yes, that does get slow - framebuffers aren't always the fastest type of memory and that way the access pattern is the same set of memcpy()s as for any other huge font, so we won't need to deal with "fast fonts" and "slow fonts" beyond basic geometry characteristics), but synthesize a new font in the regular font table at init-time and then use it like any pre-existing font (just that it happened to be added after load).