WPF Text Blog

The text clarity improvements in WPF4 bring WPFs text rendering to near GDI compatibility. Below is another set of comparison shots between VS2008 (GDI) and VS2010 (WPF4). These were taken with the newly released VS2010 . I have intentionally not marked...

Yesterday we released VS2010 and .Net4 . Now everyone can try out the new features that I have blogged about for nearly a year. In addition to the features that I worked on, my coworkers have been busy adding other great things like… Graphics Layout Rounding...

During each milestone of WPF4, we have been working to improve our text rendering. WPF4 Beta2 included new text rendering and formatting modes. The RC contained additional bug fixes to our rendering. We hoped that this work would solve WPF’s text rendering...

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ClearType text filtering relies heavily on alpha blending ( overview of ClearType). This algorithm must know the color of the text and the color behind the text before creating the final glyph bitmap. Determining the background color can sometimes be...

The WPF text team has seen some people get confused about what units WPF uses when measuring text. Samer, a developer on the WPF text team, and I have created this post to try and shed some light on this subject. The first part of this post is very straight...

Most current editors provide built in spell checking which validates user input. Spell checkers can be found in anything from word processors, to email clients, and even web browsers. Depending on the scenario, these spell checking utilities vary in complexity...

Since the initial release of WPF, Run.Text has been a normal CLR property. This has meant that Run.Text lacks all the benefits of the WPF dependency property system, most notably the ability to be bound. In some cases, one could substitute Runs for TextBlock...

WPF provides extensive customizability to app authors, allowing them to change the default look and feel of most controls. One exception to this has been the color of the caret in WPF TextBoxes and RichTextBoxes. Since this functionality was not originally...

The default visual appearance of most objects in WPF can be easily tweaked, if not swapped out for a completely different visual tree. This provides developers far greater power over the visual look of an application than ever before. Facilitating the...

WPF’s layout engine frequently gives elements s ub-pixel positions. Antialiasing algorithms cause these sub-pixel positioned elements to be rendered over multiple physical pixels after filtering. This can result in blurry lines and other non desirable...

Please note that the screenshots in this post are not displaying correctly. To view them in their full fidelity, right click on them and save them as a .PNGs. Then use your image viewing program of choice. Text Formatting API The attached...

Since DirectWrite will now be using a different blog, the name of this blog will return to WPF Text Blog. - Chipalo

In order to consolidate information from various blogs about the DirectX family of APIs, we have created a central DirectX blog site - http://blogs.msdn.com/DirectX/ All future posts on DirectWrite will be posted on the DirectX blog along with information...

WPF 4.0 Beta1 was released last month. While many exciting features were included in Beat1, there was no work targeting text, flow, or layout. This will all be reversed with WPF Beat2. Below is a brief overview for each of the features included in Beta2...

Hi, my name is Niklas Borson and I’m a developer on the DirectWrite team at Microsoft. DirectWrite has multiple layers of functionality, including text layout, script processing, glyph rendering, and the font system. In this post, I’d like to talk about...

Hi, my name is Mikhail Leonov, and I’m a Senior Software Development Engineer on the DirectWrite team at Microsoft. I would like to address common user feedback on DirectWrite in a relatively informal ‘simple question – simple answer’ format. Feedback...

There is now DirectWrite content in MSDN as part of the Win7 beta documentation.    The content includes overview docs, API reference and sample code.  If you have downloaded the Windows 7 beta, try out the DirectWrite APIs and send...

Hello – my name is Sriram Subramanian and I am a Senior Program Manager on Windows 7 for text.  As you can see from the updated title – this blog will start discussing the new DirectWrite text APIs in Windows 7 in addition to the WPF text and layout...

I have posted a doc about: problems inherent to rendering small text, how WPF tackles these problems, and workarounds that can be employed to mitigate some rendering problems until these issues are resolved. You can find it on WindowsClient.net here ...

Hi, my name is Chipalo, and I am a program manager on WPF. Unfortunately, Chris is no longer with Microsoft. I wanted to introduce myself because I have taken over his responsibilities and will be maintaining this blog in the future.

We're quite excited about our upcoming WPF 3.5 release which will now support seven Indic scripts!! For those of you curious about what languages this implies, here's a mapping between scripts, languages, and fonts: Script Font...

Thanks to all who attended TypeCon's Fonts and Typography in WPF workshop. We had a great time chatting with you all Thursday morning. In the below zip file you can find some of the material we went over in the lab. This includes: 1. The extremely...

Hi everyone, our team is seeking a strong developer to help us design and deliver world-class text processing components for the newer versions of Microsoft Windows. To apply, please follow this link - http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search...

Unrelated to text, but extremely cool... Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once talked about putting a PC on every desk. Now Gates is talking about turning the desk itself — or a tabletop — into a computer. Microsoft is set to announce an ambitious new...