As you guys would know, Beta 1 of VS 2010 has been released, and I love Visual Studio, in fact it’s my FAVOURITE IDE, and not to mention one of my favourite tools of all time… and that’s why I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH, how I’m hoping Microsoft will fix the WPF font rendering / blur / fuzziness whatever you may call it ‘bug’. I’m hoping this will be fixed by official release of Visual Studio 2010 RTM, which is supposedly dependent on WPF 4.0. See the official bug report here over at Microsoft Connect.
In case any of you do not know what I’m talking about, see my previous article where I raved about the same thing in all WPF apps. Which is one huge reason which aids my decision in not releasing a WPF app to a customer. You will also see in that article some shocking comparisons between WPF’s font rendering stack and the traditional GDI font rendering stack featured in most other apps.
But in case you aren’t sure what I mean with Visual Studio. Check it out, basically with Visual Studio having been re-designed with most components and controls completely in WPF, you will now see the nasty WPF font rendering issue seep into our beloved Visual Studio!
(click to view – make you click the magnifying glass to zoom as well, otherwise it might all look ultra blurry)
If you look closely at the far right of that screenshot when you have viewed it in fullscreen view, you can notice the Solution Explorer, which appears to remain the same rendered in GDI font rendering – just look at the clarity differences!
Viewing text like this constantly that isn’t clear, sharp and rich, would drive me insane, not to mention would probably drive me nuts from eye strain. Don’t get me wrong, I love Clear Type technology, that is not what this is about. We need correct pixel snapping (or something to fix it), plus the anti-aliasing gained from clear type. Right now the WPF font rendering engine is using a different algorithm called Ideal Width Layout, instead of what is featured in GDI text rendering; Compatible Width Layout.
So here’s hoping for changes by the release of Visual Studio. I am now really concerned, as this involves my baby Visual Studio, and not just a consumer app I have to work with.
Now this will either go one of two ways, 50% of you will agree with me and will be expressing similar concerns and the other 50% of you will wonder what the hell we’re on about and see no problem with it, and for that I have sympathy for you, or perhaps envy, if they keep it like this for the future.
7 Comments
The text rendering enhancements will not be available until Beta 2 of .NET 4.0. After that, you will see text that looks as crisp as VS 2008.
-Jer
Oh well that sorts that out then! I still enjoyed writing the post.
Where did you hear that Jeremiah?
I too was confused about the font issue fix when I first ran VS 2010, but I got word from the horses mouth via the .NET 4.0 TAP.
Personally, I am very anxious to see the new text rendering stack in action!
This font rendering looks just like Mac OS X Quartz rendering and from what I read the reasoning behind is very similar as well. If I am not mistaken, it had to do with something like print fidelity. I hope it is really gone by beta 2, because that kind of rendering is what renders me headaches (pun intended) after playing around for more than 15 minutes with Mac OS X.
Thanks for your input Rui, I would agree with you.
Beta 2 is out now and the fonts are still way harder to read than in VS 2008.
VS2010 RC has same issue…
Post a Comment