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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.

The first thing I've seen just opening the code editor was ClearType font rendering. Wow, so unexpectedly. I must note that I do not use standard Windows rendering techniques, but I still prefer GDI++, a font renderer developed by Japanese developers. (GDI++ allows to render the fonts in Mac/Win-Safari style over entire Windows.) Personally for me, GDI++ reaches the great font-rendering results allowing me to use the Dejavu Sans Mono font with really nice smoothing in Visual Studio 2008 (VS 2005 too, though VS 2005 crashes in this case).

But GDI++ cannot affect Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 text editor - it uses ClearType (right?), and it does not care about the system font smoothing settings. It could be an editor based on WPF, right? So as far as I can see, I can't use GDI++ anymore because it uses Windows GDI(+) but no WPF?

So I've got several questions:

  1. Is it possible to disable VS 2010 b2 built-in ClearType or override it with another font smoother?
  2. Is it possible to install a Safari-like font renderer for Visual Studio 2010 [betas]?

Thanks a lot.

long time update: http://code.google.com/p/gdipp/issues/detail?id=37

Lyubomyr Shaydariv
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1 Answers1

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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)

Ryck
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