{Programming} & Life

This has bugged me since the beginning of time! OK, since the beginning of ever seeing WPF forms and controls. Have you ever noticed that WPF elements looks blurry and washed out compared to non-WPF elements?

WPF:

(sorry to pick on you NCover, but you were open at the time)

Non-WPF:

Can you spot the difference? Particularly in the text.  Well it seems I’m not crazy! there is finally an answer for this! and it should be fixed by WPF 4.0.

There are numerous, other people who have also complained about this.  And a suggested fix for some quirks.  But the official word as quoted in that first answer by the WPF Graphics Team is:

We are replacing WPF’s text rendering stack in WPF 4.0, and this should allow you to render text with comparable sharpness to what you’re used to with GDI. The reason the existing text stack in WPF looks blurrier than GDI’s is that GDI text is typically rendered with Compatible Width Layout, whereas WPF’s existing text stack always uses Ideal Width Layout. Compatible Width Layout snaps glyphs to pixel boundaries, Ideal Width does not, which is why WPF’s text looks blurrier than GDI’s. WPF’s existing text stack also does not support use of the embedded bitmaps that are included in many fonts and are intended to be used when rendering at smaller sizes.

The new text stack in WPF 4.0 will allow Compatible Width Layout, and it will also support embedded font bitmaps. We believe this will solve all of our text blurriness issues.

Horray for that!