DirectWrite

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DirectWrite is a text-layout and glyph-rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update installed).^[1]

Microsoft Office 2013 supports either Direct2D/DirectWrite or GDI/Uniscribe for display rendering and typography.^[2]

Contents

1 Features
2 Supported scripts
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

Features [edit]

Comprehensive support for Unicode, with over 20 scripts providing layout and rendering of every language supported in Windows. DirectWrite supports measuring, drawing, and hit-testing of multi-format text. Supported Unicode features include BIDI, line breaking, surrogates, UVS, language-guided script itemization, number substitution, and glyph shaping.

Sub-pixel ClearType text rendering with bi-directional antialiasing which can interoperate with GDI/GDI+, Direct2D/Direct3D and any application-specific technology. When using with Direct2D, text rendering can be hardware-accelerated or can use WARP software rasterizer when hardware acceleration is not available.

Supports advanced typographic features of OpenType, such as stylistic alternates and swashes, which were never supported in GDI and WinForms.

Provides a low-level glyph rendering API for those who employ proprietary text layout and Unicode-to-glyph processing.

Supported scripts [edit]

‡ No default system font provided in Windows. Braille, Ogham, and Runic are supported by Segoe UI Symbol.

See also [edit]

Pango a cross platform library for rendering text in high quality, emphasising support for multilingual text
Cairo a vector-based cross platform graphics library that can render text

References [edit]

^ "The Platform Update for Windows Vista - DirectX Developer Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs". Blogs.msdn.com. 2009-09-10. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
^ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2012/07/29/office-adopts-new-windows-display-technology.aspx

External links [edit]

MSDN: Introducing DirectWrite

v t e Microsoft APIs and frameworks

Graphics	Desktop Window Manager Direct2D Direct3D D3D (extensions) GDI / GDI+ WPF Silverlight WinRT XAML Windows Color System Windows Image Acquisition Windows Imaging Component

Audio	DirectMusic DirectSound DirectX plugin XACT Speech API XAudio2

Multimedia	DirectX Media Objects Video Acceleration DirectInput DirectShow Image Mastering API Managed DirectX Media Foundation XNA Windows Media Video for Windows

Web	MSHTML RSS Platform JScript VBScript BHO XDR SideBar Gadgets TypeScript

Data access	Data Access Components Extensible Storage Engine ADO.NET Entity Framework Sync Framework Jet Engine MSXML OLE DB OPC

Networking	Winsock LSP Winsock Kernel Filtering Platform Network Driver Interface Specification Windows Rally BITS P2P API MSMQ MS MPI DirectPlay

Communication	Messaging API Telephony API WCF

Administration and management	Win32 console Windows Script Host WMI (extensions) PowerShell Task Scheduler Offline Files Shadow Copy Windows Installer Error Reporting Event Log Common Log File System

Component model	COM COM+ ActiveX Distributed Component Object Model .NET Framework

Libraries	Base Class Library (BCL) Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) Active Template Library (ATL) Windows Template Library (WTL)

Device drivers	Windows Driver Model Windows Driver Foundation KMDF UMDF WDDM NDIS UAA Broadcast Driver Architecture VxD

Security	Crypto API CAPICOM Windows CardSpace Data Protection API Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI)

.NET	ASP.NET ADO.NET Base Class Library (BCL) Remoting Silverlight TPL WCF WCS WPF WF

Software factories	EFx Factory Enterprise Library Composite UI CCF CSF

IPC	MSRPC Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) Remoting WCF

Accessibility	Active Accessibility UI Automation

Text and multilingual support	DirectWrite Text Services Framework Text Object Model Input method editor Language Interface Pack Multilingual User Interface Uniscribe

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Digital typography