27 May, 2009
Direct2D DirectWrite Visual Studio Windows 7
Microsoft has added two interesting new API’s to Windows 7: Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct2D replaces GDI and GDI+. It can render more accurate results and has support for hardware acceleration on your graphics hardware. DirectWrite is a new API to render text. It makes it easy to render paragraphs of text that can contain different formatting, coloring, fonts etc. It supports horizontal and vertical alignments, even vertical centering of a paragraph with multiple lines which was not possible with the old text API, etc. This article will give an introduction to the new DirectWrite API. Read the rest of this entry »
21 May, 2009
Direct2D DirectWrite Visual Studio Windows 7
The Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 release contains the Windows 7 Beta SDK. For Direct2D and DirectWrite there were some breaking changes between the beta version of the SDK and the RC version of the SDK. So if you want to use those new Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs, you definitely need the latest Windows 7 RC SDK. There are some manual steps involved in getting that to work with Visual C++ 2010. For detailed explanation please check out Using the Windows 7 RC SDK in Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 on the Visual C++ Team Blog.
19 May, 2009
Direct2D DirectWrite Windows 7
I’m working on a new article to be published on Codeguru. The new article will be about using Direct2D and DirectWrite on Windows 7 from C++.
I was really impressed while playing with those new APIs. The two APIs combined are pretty powerful and allow you to easily render complicated formatted text. The screenshot below shows what the demo application that will be included with the article is capable of rendering. The code behind everything you see in the screenshot is pretty simple.
The demo will show rendering paragraphs of text with different fonts, font sizes, styles (bold, italic, underlined…), font colors, text alignment and so on. It also shows that mixing left-to-right and right-to-left text is not a problem and how to render fancy text using special typgraphic features that are present in certain fonts. Hit testing will also be included which can for example be used to embed interactive hyperlinks into DirectWrite rendered text. Click on the screenshot to see a full sized version 🙂
NOTE: I have no idea what the Arabic piece of text is saying, so do not blame me if it says something wrong. It’s just for demonstration purposes.
