Tips for improving your WPF text rendering experience

re: Tips for improving your WPF text rendering experience

aelij — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:17:37 GMT

It seems that ClearType is OFF in popups (e.g. menus and combo boxes) - I only get grayscale antialiasing, which is pretty bad. Is that because Popups are layered windows (AllowsTransparency=true)?

re: Tips for improving your WPF text rendering experience

hypersw — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:57:36 GMT

We're looking for a way to override the WPF ClearType setting right the other way — force it ON when the system setting reads OFF. Somehow like IE7 does, you know.

The point is that, as WPF would not render aliased text, its presentation cannot follow system “OFF” settings in any case. But full-pixel antialiasing (“grayscale”) renders much worse a presentation than ClearType at the typical UI tasks on the typical 96 DPI screen. Having to break the user settings, we'd like to choose the least evil possible.

I'm not sure if users will stand the full-pixel antialiasing of controls' text or not. I, for instance, would not. So, go ClearType, or ditch WPF, as it seems to be.

Can this be done at “user level”? By tweaking the HwndSource/HwndTarget/CompositionTarget? By sending a MIL CMD? I'm afraid that without the help of a WPF team insider it would be hard to dig it up in time. On the other hand, going back WinForms does not seem nice at all. Can you help?

re: Tips for improving your WPF text rendering experience

marmot4 — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:53:45 GMT

I have used WPF to create a rich display of data in a WinForms application. The difference in how the text is rendered between the WinForms portions and the WPF portions is really problematic.

From what I've read on the forums, there is no way to change this text rendering behavior. Are there any plans to allow this to be changed to render the same as every other application in Windows?

Unfortunately, we may have to pull the WPF out and use an HTML rendering tool because of this issue.

Thanks