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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, built-in font smoothing

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, built-in font smoothing

I've just installed Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 onto my Windows XP to evaluate it and check whether it meets my preferences the way it did before. Okay, I've temporary defeated an urgent bug with a strange workaround (I could not open any file from the Solution Explorer), and it left bad memories to me. But however, it's okay.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 341
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"The Visual Studio 2010 shell is based on WPF, it uses the WPF font rendering engine instead of GDI, so you can't use GDI++ with it.

I have to admit I'm not a great fan of WPF, I know the WPF rendering is the correct way (with sub-pixel positioning, Y direction anti-aliasing and so on) but personally I prefer the old plain GDI.

The first time I saw VS2010 I thought ""oh this is horrible I can't believe noticed this"". But it turned out ClearType was disabled in the test virtual machine, and because of that WPF reverted to gray-scale anti-aliasing and everything looked horrible.

After a quick Google search I found the following article about text rendering in WPF:

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/white-papers/wpftextclarity.aspx

If ClearType is enabled in Windows, WPF uses ClearType, if it's disabled WPF uses Grayscale fall back
anti-aliasing, which is much blurrier. So I turned on ClearType, set the fonts one size larger and now everything looks much better. (although it takes time to get used to it)"