Designing with Silverlight

ClearType in Silverlight 3

JonathanEdwards — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:56:47 GMT

According to this post, Silverlight 3 will have ClearType rendering (in final release, not the beta). Yay!

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

tlowry00 — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:57:30 GMT

we are using Silk Test from Borland to test our Silverlight application. Silk Test does not yet support testing Silverlight applications natively so we are trying to use an OCR interface. Unfortunately the text rendering is not clear in Silverlight so the OCR cannot recognize the text. We're hoping that ClearText will fix this problem

-thad

Development Manager

AZPM Consulting

Re: Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

party42 — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:08:18 GMT

In all honesty, I couldn't give less about cleartype. I'd rather see a normal readable font for one. After that, there's allways room for cleartype. IMO Cleartype can't be a workaround for a lesser font rendering engine...

Re: Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

Harlequin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:00:42 GMT

Remember, ClearType isn't about making the font look good, it's about making text more readable. I think on this subject, the Silverlight team needs to go into their Microsoft directory and ping Bill Hill on it. Bring him in for a meeting/consult. He helped invent ClearType and should shed some light as to why Silverlight needs it. He's on the IE team right now but I'd think he'd be happy to give you a talking to :)

Re: Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

pbz — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:07:50 GMT

I've only seen MS change its course when people were up in arms about something; so if this is what it takes... ;)

Re: Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

peterassmann — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:31:10 GMT

Of course you are right. But calm down. Of course it's sad if they lose all the possibilities that lay within Silverlight. But it's their problem, at last. ;)

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

ralphpurtcher — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:32:58 GMT

Mark Rideout:
Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed? Any examples would help.

Thanks!

-mark
Program Manager
Microsoft
This post is provided "as-is"

Please have a look at the following excellent article, and compare rendering of small text in Flash and Silverlight: http://fortes.com/2007/05/font-rendering-in-across-rich-platforms

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

Geminiman — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:30:06 GMT

Font rendering quality is a functional requirement. This is not a pretty pictures tool. This is a programming tool for developers that happens to provide really great candy that graphic designers can make use of. However if no one can read the text or it looks like a two year old made the text, it can't be used for functional applications and the only thing it will be used for is designers to create pretty pictures that slide across the screen.

And guess what? If that's what it's going to be used for, they ain't going to use Silverlight, they will use Flash because they're used to Adobe tools. Get with it. This is not flash, this is .NET Winforms ++++ in a web browser. The primary use for Silverlight will be line of business applications, chat engines, and Web 2.0 applications. All of which make huge use of text.

If it can't do text and make it look marginally passible, then there is point in bothering with silverlight because NO ONE WILL USE AN APPLICATION YOU DEVELOP WITH IT.

PERIOD.

Again, get with it. Stop making excuses and fix this mess or risk losing all of the interest that you garnered from developers. (I'm sure there are 10s of thousands of developers that have played, looked at the text and went "YUK, I can't sell this!" and walked away.)

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

JonathanEdwards — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:58:30 GMT

Mark - font rendering quality is not a functional requirement. With all due respect, If you are thinking only of features and functions you will never beat Flash. Please talk to some professional designers, or some UI experts. Design matters a lot to the user experience. Ask someone on the Blend team if they would be happy having their UI rendered in Silverlight. Are the Times Reader people happy with Silverlight rendering?

Regards, Jonathan

Mark Rideout:
Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed?

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

pbz — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:02:14 GMT

rstrahl:
I'm not sure what those that are saying that even WPF font rendering looks well are smoking

I'm with you Rick, whatever it is they need to pass it along :) The first time I ever saw anything WPF or SL I noticed the text clarity problem, but I always said to myself "they're going to fix that later." Then version 1 passed by, and now version 2 is out the door and knowing that they'll use WPF for the editor in the next version of VS, I start to really get worried. I wrote off even learning SL1 because of the text issue. There are very few applications you can write that don't have any text in them.

I do agree with your "acid" test, let's formalize it:

1) Turn off ClearType in Windows
2) Visit any website that has HTML text as well as SL text with the same font and font size; take a screen shot
3) Turn ClearType on
4) Take another screen shot of the site you took in step 2
5) Zoom in 400% or 800% and start comparing the two screen shots.

Ideally:

1) If ClearType is off, the HTML and SL text should be identical, pixel by pixel.
2) If ClearType is on, the HTML and SL text should be as close as possible, preferably identical.

If this is not possible -- can't think why it wouldn't be -- then at least give us the option of controlling whether SL text is anti-aliased or not. Thanks.

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

party42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:20:46 GMT

Mark Rideout:
ClearType is not a feature that we are planning on adding for a while. We currently perform gray-scale antialiasing with gamma correction. A lot of people comment that our text looks really good without requiring ClearType. Are there specific areas where you feel ClearType is needed? Any examples would help.

Thanks!

-mark
Program Manager
Microsoft
This post is provided "as-is"

surely you haven't read this thread titled "Why do Fonts Look so Horrible in Silverlight?"

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

rstrahl — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:59:14 GMT

I'm not sure what those that are saying that even WPF font rendering looks well are smoking. WPF and Silverlight both have serious text rendering issues (except the WPF reader which is very nice - but plain control and input text is horrible).

I don't use ClearType on my machine for physical reasons and without it WPF and Silverlight look absolutely horrid. But even with ClearType turned on it doesn't get much better. Text is still blurry and the anti-aliasing blurs out noticably.

Put up any Windows Forms app next to a WPF/Silverlight app and compare the sharpness of font rendering and the difference should be quite clear especially at smaller text sizes (10pt and smaller).

This has been one of the big reasons I've been very hesitant to even implement anything in WPF. I have a number heavy text centric applications and a degradation in text quality is just not an option.

+++ Rick ---

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

pbz — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:00:15 GMT

Alexander Manenko:
So ClearType support is needed

Implementing ClearType would take some work; on the other hand a switch that would disable the blurry text (aka ClearType wanna-be) would be much easier. I can't believe after so many complained about this nothing happened. Is Microsoft really listening or just pretending?

P.S. I would prefer a way to disable the anti-aliasing rather than ClearType.

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

Alexander Manenko — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:05:06 GMT

Mark Rideout:
A lot of people comment that our text looks really good without requiring ClearType.

LOOKS GOOD??? May be these people are blind? Unfortunately Silverlight's text rendering is ugly. So ClearType support is needed.

Re: No ClearType in Silverlight

mike2036 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:29:20 GMT

I would love to see ClearType support as well.

Mike