Fullscreen tri is not necessarily the way. If the GPU has significant penalties for rejecting fragments, or your text is sparse, you should probably use form-fitting quads or polys.
Also, monospace (and implicitly, Latin) is doing a huge amount of lifting in your comment.
Of course, the example in the article is all monospaced console stuff. I've written a lot of text rendering over the years, everything from tiny bitmap for microcontrollers to analytically-antialiased true type based on code from some paper by Charles Loop years ago.
If GPU is cheap and CPU is expensive, draw one tri every frame and don't worry about the rest. If CPU is cheap and GPU is expensive, do a glyph per quad and some basic dirty rectangles if needed.
Also, monospace (and implicitly, Latin) is doing a huge amount of lifting in your comment.