Text rendering control in GDI+

Question

I've been struggling for a while with the text rendering in GDI+. We are dynamically generating images of headlines but there seems to be a lot to whish for in the library. I can set the font, font size and a few other things but I cannot control row height or letter spacing.

I have built my own class that takes a generated text image, cuts out the individual rows of text (the settings for each font is manually encoded into settings files) and reassembles them with a the row height I want. I haven't been able to solve the same problem for letter spacing though.

Does anyone have a solution for this or a recommendation of a library (OS or commercial) that solves this?

Answer 1

I don't know if this will be applicable to your solution, but in the past when I needed to render out some more sophisticated text and I wanted to have a fair amount of flexibility in how it would be rendered, I used this library:

http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/main.whtm

It's not open source, but it is free...

Alternatively, in the game space I've used bitmap fonts extensively - if you store out information such as character spacing, etc it can look exactly the same as a TTF, but you loose the ability to scale it much without introducing some decent artifacts. To get a better feel for this approach, here's a tool for building the fonts:

http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/

Hopefully one of those gives you some help - either one will give you control over character spacing and row height, but they also have their limitations.