Text(GDI) would be perfect, but does not really scroll smoothly.
while gdi cant render the text sub-pixel precise, the ex9 renderer can shift it smoothly.
so use frac to do the integer shifts in the gdi, and use a texturetransform to tweak the y position according to the fractional value.
another technique is having the gdi renderer in double size and use a shader to do a clean antialiased downsampling in the ex9 renderer.
i agree high quality text is a high priority issue. its kind of unlikely to find a general solution which is efficient, simple and high quality at the same time. but i am sure we can make the whole process much more easy.
actually sanch is working on another technique: have one texture with all the characters and place a quad with a fragment of that texture for each letter. for now he is reading font metrics from a text file (see
Font Metrics can help you). Crossfont or similar will help you to create the font metric file. but i agree that vvvv should have some nodes to read the font metrics directly. but that seems to be another proposed diploma thesis.