Edit

Share via

How to: Use Antialiasing with Text

  • Article

Antialiasing refers to the smoothing of jagged edges of drawn graphics and text to improve their appearance or readability. With the managed GDI+ classes, you can render high quality antialiased text, as well as lower quality text. Typically, higher quality rendering takes more processing time than lower quality rendering. To set the text quality level, set the TextRenderingHint property of a Graphics to one of the elements of the TextRenderingHint enumeration

Example

The following code example draws text with two different quality settings.

FontFamily fontFamily = new FontFamily("Times New Roman");
Font font = new Font(
   fontFamily,
   32,
   FontStyle.Regular,
   GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
SolidBrush solidBrush = new SolidBrush(Color.FromArgb(255, 0, 0, 255));
string string1 = "SingleBitPerPixel";
string string2 = "AntiAlias";

e.Graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.SingleBitPerPixel;
e.Graphics.DrawString(string1, font, solidBrush, new PointF(10, 10));

e.Graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.AntiAlias;
e.Graphics.DrawString(string2, font, solidBrush, new PointF(10, 60));

Dim fontFamily As New FontFamily("Times New Roman")
Dim font As New Font( _
   fontFamily, _
   32, _
   FontStyle.Regular, _
   GraphicsUnit.Pixel)
Dim solidBrush As New SolidBrush(Color.FromArgb(255, 0, 0, 255))
Dim string1 As String = "SingleBitPerPixel"
Dim string2 As String = "AntiAlias"

e.Graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.SingleBitPerPixel
e.Graphics.DrawString(string1, font, solidBrush, New PointF(10, 10))

e.Graphics.TextRenderingHint = TextRenderingHint.AntiAlias
e.Graphics.DrawString(string2, font, solidBrush, New PointF(10, 60))

The following illustration shows the output of the example code:

Screenshot that shows text with two different quality settings.

Compiling the Code

The preceding code example is designed for use with Windows Forms, and it requires PaintEventArgs e, which is a parameter of PaintEventHandler.

See also