well a combination of both,

 the outlines of the glyphs are tessellated (delaunay triangulation)

but without adding any additional vertices (assuming u meant subdivision to get close to the curved shape).

Then boundary triangles where one of the vertices is off-curve go thru a pixel shader where the curve func is "computed" and a fragment is either in the region (colored) 

or out (discarded), and the "near" curve are AA'd wrt the distance to the curve. Thus getting the resolution independence :) 

ie, zooming, rotation,...etc doesn't require any cpu processing...

Cheers,