I built a framework for cacheing letters, and a bunch of code for getting the positions of individual letters in a typeset string from the OS-level text rendering library (Core Text in OSX). And then I wrote a shader that can be called as something like a particle system, picking out the appropriate character data, placing the quad to render that character, getting the cached texture data for that character and drawing it to the screen.
After that, I refactored the character animation code to use what I had learned about buffer textures, eliminating the limits on joints (skeletal animation, mentioned here but implemented before I restarted this blog, some YouTube posts here and here) and shape keys (see this post), and saving a bunch of memory by compacting shape keys to only store data for vertexes that have useful data. It's all pretty cool but has absolutely no visible effect on the final product. Woo.
Today, I made improvements to the screen-space reflection shader (first implemented two years ago) I had been meaning to make for a long time, which means I'm getting close to the point where I can't avoid working on something new.