How to render text using FreeType

[hadjTahar]

I am trying to render text, I tried to pass the FreeType bitmap buffer to the shader as:

• Only red channel as 0-255
• Only red channel as 0-1.0
• RGBA as 0-255
• RGBA as 0-1.0

I always get the same results. I am using this as shader, the commented code lines are previous attempts.

material {
    name : TextMaterial,
    shadingModel : unlit,
    culling: none,
    blending: transparent,

    parameters : [
        {
           type : sampler2d,
           name : texture
        },
        {
           type : float,
           name : minEdge
        },
        {
           type : float,
           name : maxEdge
        }
    ],
    requires : [position, uv0]
}

fragment {
    void material(inout MaterialInputs material) {
        prepareMaterial(material);
        //vec3 textColor = vec3(0.0, 0.0, .0);

        //vec4 clr = texture(materialParams_texture, getUV0());

        //float distance = clr.r;

        //if( distance < materialParams.minEdge )
        //    material.baseColor = vec4(textColor, 0.0 );
        //else if( distance > materialParams.maxEdge )
        //    material.baseColor = vec4(textColor, 1.0);
        //else{
        //    
        //}

        //float alpha = smoothstep(materialParams.minEdge,
        //                             materialParams.maxEdge, 
        //                             distance); 
        //material.baseColor = vec4(textColor, alpha);

        //if( distance > .5 )
        //    material.baseColor = vec4(textColor, distance);
        //else
        //    material.baseColor = vec4( vec3(0.0, 0.0, .0), 0.0);
        
        vec4 clr = texture(materialParams_texture, getUV0());
        material.baseColor = clr;


    }
}

Here is the sampler I am using, but I tried all the parameter combinations to no avail

    filament::TextureSampler sampler(
        filament::TextureSampler::MinFilter::LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR,
        filament::TextureSampler::MagFilter::NEAREST,
        filament::TextureSampler::WrapMode::CLAMP_TO_EDGE
        );

    sampler.setWrapModeS(filament::TextureSampler::WrapMode::REPEAT);
    sampler.setWrapModeT(filament::TextureSampler::WrapMode::REPEAT);

For large font sizes I get good rendering quality, but no so much for smaller font size, the included images are for font size 111, and 22

I only tried this on Windows 10 with a "nvidia gtx 1050 ti" GPU