A method and apparatus for increasing efficiency in displaying characters on a display within the data processing system. A plurality of processes for displaying characters on the display in a data processing system are provided. Each of the processes requires a different amount of processor resources to display characters on the display. One of the processes is selected such that the selected process provides a more efficient display of characters on the display than other processes. Characters may be displayed by caching font data in system memory of the data processing system. Glyph bitmaps for a particular character may be moved from the cache to a graphics adapter utilizing a permanent move instruction available in the CPU. Characters are moved to the graphics adapter on a fixed scanline basis, either encompassing the entire width of the character or the entire string of characters on a line.