Comments on: GPU Effects & Blurry Text

By: cplotts

cplotts — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:27:11 +0000

@Chris, heh heh, glad my post was helpful!

Yeah, there is always something new I’m learning about WPF … even now, almost 4 years after first diving into this technology.

By: Chris Cavanagh

Chris Cavanagh — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:52:58 +0000

Cory – Thanks for this! Saw the issue for the first time today (not sure how I missed it; only 2 years too late :] ).

By: cplotts

cplotts — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:21:21 +0000

Interesting problem @xyzzer … and your alignment solution makes sense.

Glad you figured it out.

By: xyzzer

xyzzer — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:27:37 +0000

@xyzzer
Actually, it turned out that a VisualBrush based on a frameless Border with a TextBlock inside will only use the TextBlock as its dimensions, so the fix for the alignment issue … was to use a Border with a BorderThickness of 1, but BorderBrush set to Transparent.

The text is a bit stronger with the blurred version in the background VisualBrush, but it is still better and will do for now. It could possibly be improved if I used a custom pixel shader instead of using DropShadowEffect.

I still think it is a bug in WPF.

By: xyzzer

xyzzer — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:17:58 +0000

This looks like a good solution, but I am actually trying to have my text drop a shadow, not the border around it. I figured I could use a copy of the text created with a VisualBrush as a background to the actual text and drop a shadow from that background copy, but I am having some issues with positioning.

By: cplotts

cplotts — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:07:05 +0000

Glad to hear it, @Albert.

By: Albert

Albert — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:51:20 +0000

Thanks, this helped me a lot! Cheers!

By: Gerhard Schneider (WPF Graphics)

Gerhard Schneider (WPF Graphics) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:01:08 +0000

If the effect’s input texture pixels align with the destination pixels, you won’t see the bilinear filtering artifacts because bilinear filtering won’t do any averaging of pixels. You can observe the difference by writing a simple identity (pass through) shader effect and comparing the use of Bilinear and NearestNeighbor filtering on the implicit input while moving the element with the effect by sub-pixel offsets.

By: cplotts

cplotts — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:43:09 +0000

Update: it looks as if the blurry text issue is different from losing anti-aliasing on a rotated border. Brendan Clark of Microsoft responded here and here about the latter issue.

By: cplotts

cplotts — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:24:47 +0000

Thanks Gerhard.

Also, can you explain why this issue seems to be intermittent at times?

I mean, at times, it shows up in the designer surfaces only … other times it shows up in the running executable only … other times it shows up in both places.

Do you think this issues is related at all to losing anti-aliasing on a rotated border (see link in my Update 2 section).