Preview of Upcoming Direct2D/DirectWrite Article

19 May, 2009 C++, Software Development 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.