Has font rendering improved in Silverlight 3?

Question

I have been reluctant to spend much time learning Silverlight due to what I think is one of its main shortcomings: font rendering. Fonts look absolutely horrible especially at small font sizes and I think it makes it completely useless for any serious (business) application. I have noticed developers tend to cover this up by using light font colours on a dark background.

I have seen many complaints on forums and mentioned this to a Microsoft employee. He replied this is common complaint which will be addressed in Silverlight 3. Others report that although ClearType fonts are supported in SL 3 the font problem is more fundamental and not likely to be resolved any time soon.

Now that SL 3 has been released, has anyone doing active SL development noticed a marked improvement over previous versions?

Answer 1

I just tested a few apps on silverlight.net, some with dark text on white background, including this one. It's good, though it still does not fit into the pixel grid everywhere, like ClearType does. It's good enough though, in my opinion.

Answer 2

Its a huge improvement over Silverlight 2. Text that was previously borderline unreadable looks great. The ClearType rendering works on in all browsers/OSes so this is an across the board improvement.

Answer 3

Yes, I would say that it has improved quite a bit. Have a look at the following comparison:

http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/wpf/2009/07/silverlight-v3-cleartype-font-rendering-a-comparison/

Previously SL used the same rendering technique as WPF, simple anti-aliasing. However, now SL3 has ClearType support, where fonts are smoothed using sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

But ... this is only applied if the user has ClearType enabled. AFAIK, this is off by default on Windows XP. So if possible, check with your users first!

Still not as good as WinForms, especially when rendering bold text.

Colin E.