Drawing text in .NET
Solution 1
GDI+ was Microsoft's first attempt at rendering resolution independent text. And the only way to render text in .NET 1.x. It got widely panned for its quality issues, inspiring the introduction of TextRenderer and Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault() in .NET 2.0. It uses GDI for drawing text, effectively solving the problems. You should only use Graphics.DrawString() on high resolution devices. Printers.
Fwiw, the second attempt was WPF and it also got a lot of flack for fuzzy text problems. Solved in .NET 4.
Try this sample form to see one of the worst problems:
public partial class Form1 : Form {
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
}
protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
e.Graphics.DrawString("Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii",
this.Font, Brushes.Black, 0, 0);
}
}
Solution 2
Following code comes from an example on MSDN:
var fontFamily = new FontFamily("Times New Roman");
var font = new Font(fontFamily, 32, FontStyle.Regular, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
var solidBrush = new SolidBrush(Color.FromArgb(255, 0, 0, 255));
e.Graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.AntiAlias;
e.Graphics.DrawString("Your Text Here", font, solidBrush, new PointF(10, 60));
I tested this and it worked fine, a smooth text was drawn on my form! ;) Here's the link to the article.
Solution 3
The Graphics.DrawString
method resides in the System.Drawing
namespace, which means it uses GDI+ under the covers instead of GDI, which is what the TextRenderer.DrawText
method is using.
It looks like the specific cause of the difference in this case is anti-aliasing. You can control anti-aliasing through the Graphics.TextRenderingHint
property.
graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.SingleBitPerPixelGridFit;
I believe that you can also disable it on a per-font basis using the method shown by Abbas.
Solution 4
Apart from the other suggestions, which are probably more correct in your case, you could also try to use an Octree-based Quantization of the image. I use it for normal pictures, not for text. There is a Microsoft article that talks in details about this and has an example project: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479306.aspx
Daniel Peñalba
Software Engineer at Unity Technologies, Valladolid, Spain. Currently developing gmaster, Plastic SCM and SemanticMerge. Areas: C# GUI development Winforms and WPF expert ASP .NET Core Multiplatform UI development with Mono (Linux and OSX, GTK# and MonoMac) Eclipse plugin, Java Automated testing, NUnit, Moq, PNUnit and TestComplete Email: dpenalba[AT]codicesoftware[DOT]com I play the guitar at Sharon Bates, the greatest Spanish rock band.
Updated on August 30, 2020Comments
-
Daniel Peñalba over 3 years
I'm doing some tests about drawing text in .Net and I had the following results.
- The first string is a native Label with the
FlatStyle
set toSystem
- The second string is drawn using
Graphics.DrawString()
method - The last one is drawn using
TextRenderer.DrawText()
method
All cases use the default Windows Vista/7 font: Segoe UI, 9
As you can see, there is a difference between the second string and the others (it has less quality, and the anti alias is different). I have tried to configure anti-alias and the smoothing mode in the
Graphics
object, without any result.Is it possible to draw text usign
Graphics.DrawString
and get the same quality than others methods?Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I have reviewed the code with Reflector. I realized that
Graphics.DrawString
uses gdiplus.dll calling method GdipDrawString() andTextRenderer.DrawText
uses user32.dll callingDrawTextExW
andDrawTextExA
.Any comment about it?
- The first string is a native Label with the
-
Daniel Peñalba over 12 yearsSorry, but this answer is not correct. Please, try to reproduce the example by using a system label with the same that font and color, and you will see that the text is not exactly drawn. -1.
-
Daniel Peñalba over 12 yearsPlayed with TextRenderingHint, tested all possibilities and no favorable result.
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Abbas over 12 yearsOk, there is a MINOR difference but if you use "TextRenderingHint.AntiAliasGridFit", the quality is equal. I reproduced my example with a Label to check the results! :)