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Silverlight 2 RC0 text rendering 'improved'?

There have been a lot of threads on the forums complaining about Silverlight's text rendering. Here are a few:

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/29581.aspx

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/10518.aspx

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/17062.aspx

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/22103.aspx

In RC0, the text rendering has changed. It looks a bit darker and a bit clearer at certain resolutions, but I have also seen complaints about not enough antialiasing now with RC0. Some of it probably has to do with how clear your monitor is. If you're on an LCD screen, you're probably going to see more jaggies. I was never one who really thought the text looked terrible, but I applaud the Silverlight team's efforts to try to improve text quality.

So my question is, if you're one of those who have been complaining about how crappy text looked in Beta 2, do you think that RC0 is an improvement?

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Posted: Sep 27 2008, 07:25 by Bill Reiss | Comments (9) RSS comment feed |
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Bruce Denham us said:

Bruce DenhamOverall, the text for RC0 did NOT improve. It may have gotten a bit sharper, but it also got bolder, and so now it just looks clunky (dumpy). Embedded fonts don't fair any better in RC0 than they did in B2. Silverlight has a LONG way to go before they make it to the level of type control that Flash brings to the table. Currently, Flash shames Silverlight...badly. Think ComicSans (Silverlight) vs. MyriadPro (Flash). Flash renders text at an entirely different level of sophistication. Really disappointing for us Silverlight designers...

# September 30 2008, 17:16

Bill Reiss us said:

Bill ReissBruce,

Thanks for your feedback on this. Hopefully we can get some more people to comment and I can send it up the flagpole.

Bill

# September 30 2008, 17:18

Bill Reiss us said:

Bill ReissI found this on Scott Guthrie's blog comments:

[quote=ScottGu]
Friday, September 26, 2008 10:18 AM by ScottGu
Hi James,

>>>>>>> Fonts look slightly better, but still hideous.

Font rendering quality is one of the improvements in the RC. There are still big improvements we plan to make in the future though (the tricky part about fonts is you need to make the spacing the same on all platforms - so our text rendering engine can't use some of the higher-level Windows and Mac features, which is why we are building a new text engine that will have great rendering and be portable).
[/quote]

So I don't know the timing of this new text engine, I'll try to find out.

# October 02 2008, 09:24

Bruce Denham us said:

Bruce DenhamGreat, Bill. Thanks for your efforts in this area! Keep us informed.

# October 03 2008, 03:49

Bill Reiss us said:

Bill ReissBruce,

I was pleasantly surprised with how well my new PathTextBlock control http://www.codeplex.com/sltext did at rendering text at smaller sizes, I meant it to really be for big text with crazy effects but it seems to hold its own. I did a test with Arial FontSize 11, and it looked better to me than the RC0 rendering. I'd like to hear your feedback on it.

# October 06 2008, 18:47

jfffrsn us said:

jfffrsnthe text still looks awful, not matter what size or font. If you have any idea when they plan to fix this i would love to know.

# November 08 2008, 22:26

Peter said:

PeterStep:

1) Turn off ClearType (XP)
2) Write some text at 12px in a WinForms application (or anywhere else)
3) Write the same text as the same size in a SilverLight application.
4) Take a screen shot of both, blow it up to 400% or 800% and compare. If the text does not align pixel by pixel is NOT good enough.

Thanks.

# December 07 2008, 05:02

Denis us said:

DenisI am with Bruce on his assessment of text rendering quality in Silverlight. In fact I would not use Silverlight for any project if it requires to show even moderate amount of text. I know all about the issues surrounding text rendering, but Microstoft should be able to do better.
If everything else fails just license text rendering engine from Adobe.

# February 27 2009, 13:26

sohbet said:

sohbetthank u
great post
love u all

# April 29 2009, 06:58

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