Drawing a String

The topic Drawing a Line shows how to write a Windows application that uses Windows GDI+ to draw a line. To draw a string, replace the OnPaint function shown in that topic with the following OnPaint function:

VOID OnPaint(HDC hdc)
{
   Graphics    graphics(hdc);
   SolidBrush  brush(Color(255, 0, 0, 255));
   FontFamily  fontFamily(L"Times New Roman");
   Font        font(&fontFamily, 24, FontStyleRegular, UnitPixel);
   PointF      pointF(10.0f, 20.0f);
   
   graphics.DrawString(L"Hello World!", -1, &font, pointF, &brush);
}

The previous code creates several GDI+ objects. The Graphics object provides the DrawString method, which does the actual drawing. The SolidBrush object specifies the color of the string.

The FontFamily constructor receives a single, string argument that identifies the font family. The address of the FontFamily object is the first argument passed to the Font constructor. The second argument passed to the Font constructor specifies the font size, and the third argument specifies the style. The value FontStyleRegular is a member of the FontStyle enumeration, which is declared in Gdiplusenums.h. The last argument to the Font constructor indicates that the size of the font (24 in this case) is measured in pixels. The value UnitPixel is a member of the Unit enumeration.

The first argument passed to the DrawString method is the address of a wide-character string. The second argument, –1, specifies that the string is null terminated. (If the string is not null terminated, the second argument should specify the number of wide characters in the string.) The third argument is the address of the Font object. The fourth argument is a reference to a PointF object that specifies the location where the string will be drawn. The last argument is the address of the Brush object, which specifies the color of the string.