Packed Font Purpose

[Daniel Brauer]

I'm just starting with NGUI, and working my way through the videos to start. I'm confused about the goal with your packed font approach: you are using each channel in a 32-bit texture for 8-bit information, and unpacking it in a shader. What does this get you over using a quadruple-sized 8-bit texture (Alpha8) and using a simpler shader?

[PhilipC]

Using the packed font is more useful for asian languages. The the number of characters that are used by those languages do not fit (at a readable size) in a 2048. So by using the packed font you would be able to have all the characters at a readable size.