Text rendering on Windows

[John C. Turnbull]

Hi Felipe,

I just finished watching your excellent presentation at SVJUGFX on text rendering with JavaFX and have a couple of multi part questions:

1) I noted that DirectWrite is now used to rasterise fonts on Windows instead of T2K or GDI and I for one am pleased about this. However, no matter what I do I just can't get JavaFX text to be rendered as crisply or as "black" as I see in native Windows apps that also use DirectWrite. The result is that my app undesirably "stands out" from a native app.

What could be the cause of this? I saw that DirectWrite provides several options for rendering text and that currently only the default one is being applied so could it have something to do with this?

Is work being done to reduce the differential between JavaFX text rendering quality and that of native Windows apps?

2) I appreciated the explanation relating to LCD text in Canvas and the issue with the Canvas initially bring a transparent surface making later blending with an actual background problematic leading to greyscale support only.

Given that many of us see this as a very serious impediment to developing complex controls that use Canvas, is there a focus within the JFX team on finding a way of supporting LCD text in Canvas and if so, which JFX version is likely to first include this support?

Thanks again for a great talk and for all the hard work you have put into improving text rendering in JavaFX :-)

-jct