I ran into this sketch on OpenProcessing.org.  
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=2722

It uses some nice techniques to get some awesome text speed.  I could sure use something like this but the example is a bit on the complex side.  I understand all the VBO stuff, but I don't understand why it's creating a new PGraphicsOpenGL, why all the changing of perspective, etc. It's impressive.. just wish I could figure it out to incorporate it into my sketch.

Could someone take a look at this and make it more usable in a normal sketch

What about using an old method of ascii mapping each char to a common texture (fonttexture).
Create a texture and divide it in a grid NxN. each cell of font size holds a char.
then map the char code to the correct texture uv. that would allow you to render a quad with a given character.

you only bind one texture for whatever text you want to render. You can create a vbo/va for the text mesh

note
you need to create a font texture yourself, or use that guys method to map a font and create a big texture with all chars ( i think that's what he's doing)

I've made an example of the method i was talking about. This example uses display lists to map each character on a texture. the char mapping is based on char codes. You could use VBO or whatever.
Quake used this technique for text rendering.

www.pixelnerve.com/temp/TextureFont.zip

A couple of font texture examples go with the package (fonts taken from Quake and the internet)

To make it even simpler to use will take some work, but looking at that link you have you could build the texture from a PFont as that guy does and with this project + his project you could maybe make a library.

Have fun.