I need to render some formatted text (colours, different font sizes, underlines, bold, etc) however I'm not sure how to go about doing it. D3DXFont only allows text of a single font/size/weight/colour/etc to be rendered at once, and I cant see a practical way to "combine" multiple calls to ID3DXFont::DrawText to do such things...

I looked around and there doesn't seem to be any existing libraries that do these things, but I have no idea how to implement such a text renderer, and I couldn't even find any documentation on how such a text render would work, only rendering simple fixed width, ASCII bitmap fonts which looking at it is probably an entirely different approach that is only suitable for rendering simple blocks of text where Unicode is not important.

If there's no direct3d font renders capable of doing this, is there any other renderers (eg for use in rendering rich text in a normal window), and would rendering those to a texture in RAM, then uploading that to the video card to render onto the back buffer yield reasonable performance?